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Maine Awards $9.6 Million For Fiber In Lincoln, Waldo Counties
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Maine’s state broadband office, the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA), has unveiled $9.6 million in new grant awards to help bring affordable fiber to 15,561 homes and businesses across 12 widely underserved communities in the Pine Tree state.
According to the announcement by the MCA, the grants will primarily be focused on leveraging public-private partnerships to drive fiber into unserved locations in Waldo and Lincoln Counties.
The grants are part of the MCA’s Partnerships for Enabling Middle Mile Program (PEMM), which addresses large-scale, regional broadband needs by leveraging middle mile infrastructure.
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Lincoln County saw a grant award of $6 million matched by $24.3 million in private and public investment including county ARPA funds (which the MCA notes was the “highest percentage of financial commitment from any public-private partnership awarded through an MCA program to date”).
The deployment, which is expected to begin in 2025, involves a partnership between Lincoln County and Consolidated Communications and will bring fiber that passes 14,436 homes and businesses in Woolwich (in Sagadahoc County), Wiscasset, Alna, Dresden, Boothbay, Edgecomb, Waldoboro, Whitefield and Nobleboro.
“This is probably the most exciting thing since cable TV came into any of these towns,” Evan Goodkowsky, broadband infrastructure consultant for Coastal Maine Regional Broadband, told the Lincoln County News.
Some Lincoln County towns have taken a more direct approach. Somerville Maine, in Lincoln County, is building its own municipal broadband network set to be completed this fall or winter.
In a separate award, Waldo County officials received a $3.6 million fiber deployment grant, matched by $1.9 million in private and public investment including municipal ARPA funds. That deployment, a partnership between the county and Direct Communications, will extend fiber that will pass 1,125 homes and businesses in Frankfort, Prospect, Stockton Springs, and Winterport.
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Both projects primarily aim to bring fiber to areas that had never before seen fiber broadband, as well as locations historically underserved by regional telecom monopolies like Comcast.
“Generally speaking, residents weren’t pleased with the Internet service landscape,” Woolwich Select Board member Tommy Davis told the Portland Press Herald. “Many were unsatisfied because they didn’t have adequate bandwidth for applications like telehealth and Zoom, either because those with providers had spotty service or couldn’t afford to access the plans they needed.”
Buoyed heavily by ARPA funding, the MCA says it has made $170 million in digital equity and infrastructure investments in the last four years, bringing broadband access to 86,000 locations across the state, while reducing the overall number of Maine addresses with no Internet connection to less than 5 percent of the state.
“This outcome is a tribute to the tenacity of the volunteer and community leaders who recognized the need for broadband long before the MCA was created,” Carlos Barrionuevo, Secretary of MCA’s Board of Directors said in a statement. “This partnership combines and leverages funding that was unavailable only a short time ago and illustrates just how far Maine has come in a short time to tackling a fundamental community need.”
Mains is now poised to receive more than $274 million in Broadband Equity And Deployment (BEAD) funding made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.
Inline map of Maine's middle mile network courtesy of the Maine Connectivity Authority website
Inline image of Old Waldo-Hancock Bridge courtesy of Flickr user cmh2315fl, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic
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