Vermont’s expanding Communications Union Districts (CUD) are pioneering creative efforts to deploy affordable broadband to the rural parts of the Green Mountain State. That includes the Lamoille FiberNet CUD, which has been making steady progress expanding affordable fiber access to fiber in the most neglected parts of rural Vermont.
Back in 2023, the Lamoille FiberNet greenlit a $24 million public-private partnership with Fidium Fiber to deliver fiber broadband access to nearly every deliverable address in Lamoille County. Two years later and the county now says that target goal has been completed.
According to an announcement by the CUD, the collaboration resulted in the deployment of 550 miles of fiber, resulting in gigabit-capable next-generation broadband access being made available to 5,000 unserved or underserved addresses across the county.
“This achievement represents years of collaboration, persistence, and smart partnership,” Andrew Ross, Lamoille FiberNet chair and Wolcott representative to the board, said in a statement. “Our shared goal was simple but ambitious: to make sure every home and business in our territory could connect to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet.”
The network was made possible, in part, to a $13.59 million grant to Lamoille FiberNet from Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) announced in 2023. Fidium will handle customer-facing Internet service and network maintenance, while the county, which will maintain ownership of some of the grant-funded fiber assets, will operate in an oversight capacity.
Lamoille had previously been in talks with Google Fiber about a potential deployment partnership with another CUD, Northwest Fiberworx. The larger project would have featured Google Fiber as the network’s first anchor tenant, but fell apart in 2022 after Google Fiber expressed skepticism about the viability of the project.
County officials tell local news outlets that there’s still around 300 addresses in Lamoille County the board hopes to connect through the federal Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, though those ambitions have been complicated by the federal government’s decision to downgrade fiber projects in favor of Elon Musk’s slower Starlink satellite service.
Read our in-depth report on Vermont has been supercharging its telecommunications infrastructure by investing in community broadband-driven efforts across the state here.
Inline image of worker pulling fiber from truck courtesy of Lamoille FiberNet website
