
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
North Carolina’s Roanoke Cooperative continues to make steady progress with expansion of its Fybe last mile fiber network within The Tar Heel State.
Cooperative officials tell ILSR that the cooperative and a coalition of organizations across North Carolina have major expansion plans in the works, starting with a fiber build in Halifax County, population 47,298.
Currently, Fybe provides fiber broadband service to around 6,000 subscribers in North Carolina, but thanks to an historic infusion of federal and state grants, the hope is to expand fiber access to the bulk of unserved addresses county-wide.
Fybe COO Bo Coughlin tells ILSR that the lion’s share of the cooperative's upcoming efforts to bring affordable connectivity to unserved and under-served portions of North Carolina will be under the banner of a coalition dubbed Encore, a nonprofit collaboration between MCNC, North Carolina Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMC), and Fybe.
“MCNC has been around for 40 years,” Coughlin notes. “It started as an economic Development institution funded by the state. Their goal was originally to help birth the microchip industry in RTP down in Raleigh, but today they provide transport to around a hundred universities, charter schools, and community anchor institutions across nearly 100 counties.”
Back in April, Fybe won a $9 million Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grant to help bring fiber to the largely underserved, heavily-rural residents of Martin, Bertie, Halifax, and Hertford counties.
“So currently, we pass about 5,000 total homes across Northampton and Halifax,” Coughlin said of Fybe’s current footprint.
“We also won the GREAT grant, which will help fund deployment to a couple thousand homes and passings; from a small area in Lake Gaston, all the way down to almost Enfield. We plan on starting that hopefully in 2025.”
Coughlin noted that the Encore coalition was custom built to prioritize rural North Carolina residents left in a lurch by regional providers that have traditionally found rural broadband deployment too cost prohibitive (or at least too cost prohibitive for impatient Wall Street investors).
“Our goal is to focus almost exclusively on the overlooked; so the un-or-underserved across the state of North Carolina,” he noted. “I think we're in a good position with the combination of the last mile of five and the transport network of MCNC.”
Coughlin noted the cooperative has already brought fiber to residents in Gates County, and is spending the next six months assessing other target areas.
The goal is to ultimately bring fiber to all of the unserved residents in Halifax County, Northampton, Hertford, and Bertie counties within the next two or three years.
Muted Competition, High Prices, Slow Service
Like so many parts of the country, most of the counties Fybe is now targeting for upgrades have long been neglected by regional telecom monopolies, which see little incentive to expand access or compete on speed, price, or the quality of their customer service.
The result has largely been a market largely dominated by regional cable giants like Charter Communications (Spectrum) – which gobbled up Time Warner Cable’s old assets in the state – and Brightspeed, which acquired Centurylink’s network. None of these companies are particularly incentivized by the market to try harder.
“It's a nightmare,” Coughlin said of the difficulties many rural North Carolina face in getting connected. “It's very challenging for anyone to not only get service, but get service they’re able to afford. So we all get the ‘I got broadband for whatever the amount is, and then three years later: how did my bill get to $200?’”
Like so many communities and tribal nations, there’s scattered fiber access spread across North Carolina, but major providers have historically refused to provide last mile access. Cable providers routinely charge an arm and a leg to extend coaxial or fiber along the last mile, even in instances where the extension only consists of a few hundred feet.
“You may have a highway passing by your house, but if you can't afford to get on it, what's the point?” Coughlin said.
Coughlin says the cooperative initially prioritized members, but success – and state grants – have allowed them to expand their attention to the state’s unserved. But even then, Coughlin noted that grants contribute a “very small” amount to the total cost of fiber expansion, which can quickly get prohibitive in more rural markets.
“If you look at this area in particular, the most you'll have in these rural communities is eight homes a mile. And your average in a metro is almost over a hundred. Your cost per passing in a metro area can be sub $500. In moderately dense rural areas it can be between $1,000 and $3,000. And in these areas you can get all the way up to $7,000 per passing.”
Enter Encore, which was specifically built to do the work incumbent investors lack the patience to see a return on.
“If I’m an incumbent provider, I’m accountable to my shareholders,” Coughlin said. “And there’s not a financial model that I can produce that really makes a whole lot of sense for them. They’re in the business to make money, I get it.”
The problem is that not only do incumbent providers not only refuse to expand access, they lobby for elaborate barriers to prevent anybody from doing so either.
Intimidated by the success of municipal fiber networks in cities like Wilson, incumbents like Time Warner Cable lobbied North Carolina lawmakers to pass restrictive and counterproductive state laws prohibiting the expansion of community-owned and operated broadband networks. ILSR data indicates that 16 states currently have preemption laws – usually ghost written by industry giants – restricting consumer choice. Though that total is down from 21 states just four years ago.
Cooperatives and BEAD
Enter cooperatives, which we’ve noted repeatedly are leveraging the lessons learned nearly a hundred years ago from rural electrification, to help expand affordable fiber access to communities and neighborhoods long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
“We partner with electrical cooperatives,” Coughlin notes. “Halifax EMC serves most if not all of Halifax except to incorporated areas. They’ve been great to work with. These EMCs have been serving these communities for 90 years. They have the same mission that Encore has. They want to provide their community and their members these vital services.”
Cooperatives and munis alike have been buoyed by generational federal broadband grants made possible by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill. Coughlin notes Fybe was able to leverage several counties’ ARPA funding, and is hopeful to obtain some of the $1.4 billion in BEAD funding North Carolina is soon poised to receive.
“We’re a little concerned with the new administration what the impact will be,” Coughlin noted, referring to the potential for the Trump administration to redirect funding away from cooperative and municipal fiber and toward incumbents or less affordable options like Elon Musk’s Starlink, which lacks the capacity to truly solve broadband access needs at full scale.
“I think we're doing the best we can,” Coughlin said of their efforts to shore up rural access. “We're going to continue to do all we can to deliver services to the people that deserve it.”
Header image courtesy of Fybe Facebook page
Inline images courtesy of Fybe Facebook page