After two years enmeshed in the unglamorous work of coalition-building, speed test data collection, and pushing state leaders to invest in better telecommunication infrastructure across Oakland’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, digital equity advocates in the East Bay city are finally seeing the fruits of their labor pay off.

The city was recently awarded a $15 million grant from the state’s $2 billion dollar Federal Funding Account, administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The grant will fund the construction of a city-owned, open-access, hybrid middle mile/last mile fiber network – one of a half-dozen grant awards the CPUC approved in the first round of funding, most of which went to support community broadband initiatives.

Courtesy of federal Rescue Plan dollars, the infusion of cash will allow the city to deploy nearly 13 miles of new middle mile 144-count fiber, upgrade almost 12 miles of existing city-owned fiber, and add 9 miles of new last mile fiber connections. As the city’s network is built, it will be connected to the state’s new massive open access middle mile network now under construction.

The FFA grants are part of California’s larger Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at seeding competition and expanding broadband access across the Golden State.

The Oakland project not only paves the way for the city to connect 14 community anchor institutions (CAIs) and nine public safety buildings, it will also expand high-speed Internet access to thousands of unserved and underserved addresses in West and East Oakland.

U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Brownsville, Texas as one of best places to live in the Lone Star State and as one of the most affordable places to retire.

Now – as the border city continues to make progress on an ambitious revitalization initiative – it is adding to its “best, most affordable” resume by transforming the digital landscape with a citywide fiber network to bring fast, reliable, and affordable Internet service to its nearly 200,000 residents.

The effort is being launched on the back of a city-owned middle mile fiber backbone and partnership with Lit Fiber to build out last mile service, operating as Lit Fiber BTX.

“We just lit up our first subscriber and will have 10,000 locations-passed by the end of the year,” Rene Gonzalez, Lit Fiber’s Senior Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs, told ILSR this week.

“Brownsville was a place that had been neglected. But now, SpaceX is here. We are here. It’s exciting.”

The excitement was palpable last week at the BTX Demo Center in downtown Brownsville where city and Lit Fiber officials held a “special community social” to celebrate service getting turned on for the first LIT Fiber BTX subscriber and to showcase what the network will offer city residents and businesses moving forward.

The popular Vermont Communications Union District (CUD) Northwest Fiberworx (NWFX) has received a $20.2 million infusion in state American Rescue Plan Act dollars to extend affordable fiber broadband into long-underserved regions of the Green Mountain State.

The St. Albans-based CUD is a nonprofit special purpose municipality with 22 member towns. Its latest build will connect 3,800 unserved and underserved households in Franklin and Grand Isle counties in the Northwest part of the state.

Great Works Internet Vermont (GWI VT) will design the network and manage the operations, though Fiberworx will own the finished build.

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“We have a unique model, that of which we will build, own and maintain a fiber-to-the-premise open-access network,” Northwest Fiberworx Network Operations Manager, Mary Kay Raymond said in a statement.

The new $20.2 million grant awarded late last month by the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCCB), was made possible by 2021 federal COVID relief funding courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act.

“Northwest Fiberworx and their partner Great Works Internet Vermont have found a way to bring service where others would not,” VCBB Deputy Director Rob Fish said of the award.

“They’re building a sustainable network to serve Vermonters for decades to come.”

As states gear up to administer federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, a handful of states are already making significant investments in municipal broadband using federal Rescue Plan dollars.

California, Maine, Vermont, and New York have each established grant programs that center municipal broadband projects (mostly fiber builds) – with New York being the most recent state to announce more than $70 million in grant awards through its ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program (MIP).

Courtesy of the U.S. Treasury’s Capital Projects Fund, the awards are part of a $228 million initiative to bring high-quality Internet connectivity and consumer-friendly choice to New York communities long-stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The City of Centennial, Colorado is making steady inroads bringing affordable fiber Internet service to the city of 106,000, leveraging its city-owned fiber backbone and a partnership with the Charlottesville, VA.-based fiber provider Ting.

Just south of Denver – in a city known for its high-tech industry, craft breweries, and family-friendly neighborhoods – voter-approved efforts to get out from under the thumb of regional monopolies has driven a surge of competition, most recently exemplified by Ting’s continued delivery of affordable gigabit fiber.

Ting Public Affairs manager Deb Walker told ISLR that while the company couldn’t break out specific details on the number of passed fiber locations in the Centennial market, they’re making inroads on fiber deployments across Colorado.

“Now that Ting has city-wide networks built or under construction in three markets in the Denver region (Centennial, Greenwood Village and Thornton), and they share certain operational resources, we report progress on those markets together in our quarterly Ting Build Scorecard,” Walker said.

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“At the end of the first quarter of 2024, we had almost 31,000 serviceable addresses in the region, mostly in Centennial as we’re just starting the other two markets,” she added.

In 2021 Ting also unveiled the construction of a new 16,000 square foot office complex and data center, Walker said. Ting is also collaborating with Colorado Springs Utilities, which is building a fiber network throughout the city and connecting local homes and businesses.

Wilbraham, Massachusetts officials are taking the first steps toward building a city-owned open access fiber network with an eye on boosting local competition and delivering affordable, next-gen broadband access to long-neglected local residents.

Having issued a request for proposal (RFP) earlier this year with the help of EntryPoint Networks, city officials are currently identifying which company they’ll hire to deploy fiber to the city of 14,749.

They say a formal plan to present to voters – as well as a total projected network cost estimate – is expected by October.

“We have no intention of raising taxes or utilizing tax dollars,” Wilbraham Broadband Advisory Committee Chair Tom Newton tells local news outlet The Reminder.

Newton says Wilbraham is hopeful the new network will be primarily financed through an enterprise fund, similar to how the town handles the cost of water and sewer. Depending on take rates, the city is also hopeful the network will be sustainable primarily through subscriber fees. How that all works out in practice remains to be seen.

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Officials are hopeful to keep the total price per household around $60 a month. A project FAQ states the city wants to deliver symmetrical 20 Mbps (megabit per second), 100 Mbps, 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, and symmetrical 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) service tiers to residents.

Data has long proven that open access fiber networks result in faster, better, and more affordable broadband service in the markets where they operate. Nothing has proven this more consistently than Utah-based UTOPIA Fiber, an inter-local agency collaborative venture that just added three additional partner ISPs.

With the three more independent ISPs joining the network, 18 different providers now offer affordable fiber service to residents in the 21 cities UTOPIA serves.

“After a careful vetting process through an RFP, WiFi Pros (Bountiful City), ETS (Layton City), and Fusion Networks (Salem City) were invited to join the UTOPIA Fiber network, effective May 1, 2024,” the organization said in a recent announcement.

The ISPs that compete over the UTOPIA open access fiber network offer a variety of different speed and pricing options, and its three new partners are no exception. Most of the pricing is dramatically lower than what’s generally been made available in U.S. broadband markets – including well developed major metropolitan markets like New York City.