As interest in municipal broadband continues to grow across the U.S., the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) has launched a mentorship program that will pair communities interested in building publicly-owned, locally controlled broadband networks with cities and towns that have successfully done so.

“We’re excited to match AAPB members with communities seeking to take control of their broadband futures,” AAPB Executive Director Gigi Sohn said in announcing the program.

“We want to demystify the process for those communities that want to ensure that everyone in their city or town has affordable access to everything that broadband enables, and we believe that our members that own their broadband infrastructure are the best people to do that.”

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While an increasing number of communities are exploring municipal broadband as a solution to local connectivity challenges after decades of frustration with the spotty, expensive service of big monopoly providers consistently ranked as among the most hated companies in America, local officials still must navigate the logistical, technical, financial, and political challenges associated with building and operating municipal networks.

Indio, California has been awarded a $9 million state grant the city will use to expand affordable broadband access. The grant award was made possible by California’s $2 billion Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program (FFA), part of a broader $6 billion California “Broadband For All” initiative aimed at bridging the digital divide in the Golden State.

According to Indio officials and the now-finalized CPUC award, Indio – an incorporated city located in Riverside County and home to 92,000 residents – will receive $8.9 million to deliver gigabit-capable fiber to 479 unserved locations and an estimated 3,632 unserved local residents.

“We are still in the design phase and should release an RFP within the next couple of months for the actual build,” Indio Director of Information Technology Ian Cozens told ILSR.

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With 75 percent of the project’s initial target area classified as low-income, city leaders say residents can expect static pricing for at least ten years. The city will also ensure there’s a low-cost option for low-income families left adrift after House and Senate Republicans blocked the funding renewal of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).

City officials, however, do not intend to stop there. The plan is to build a citywide fiber network, the full cost of which is estimated to be $35.2 million.

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.

*In partnership with Broadband Breakfast, we occasionally republish each other's content. The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Jericho Casper was originally published here.

The broadband market is often described as robustly competitive. But some have their doubts.

With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) preparing a biennial report to Congress assessing competition in communications, some industry stakeholders have voiced concern over the growing dominance of a few major players.

Last Thursday, representatives from INCOMPAS, the trade association for competitive communications companies, met with FCC officials to discuss the forthcoming 2024 Communications Marketplace Report. This report is intended to guide FCC policies that foster competition, innovation, and consumer choice in the industry.

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During the meeting, INCOMPAS President Angie Kronenberg and Attorney Lindsay Stern emphasized the ongoing issue of high market concentration in the fixed broadband internet access service sector, urging the FCC to more closely examine the barriers that stifle competition.

In an August 12 filing at the FCC, INCOMPAS pointed out that the top four broadband providers—Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon—dominate nearly 80% of the fixed BIAS market, leaving most consumers with only one or two options for broadband service, especially at higher speed tiers.

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.

Consumer Reports’ latest survey of the most popular ISPs in America is once again dominated by smaller providers and community-owned and operated broadband networks.

The magazine’s semi-paywalled report measured the opinions of 48,000 readers on a 100 point scale across four criteria: value for money, connection reliability, customer service, and speed.

The top ranked (95 points) ISP in the nation according to Consumer Reports was Greenlight, a small fiber operator that deploys largely around upstate New York. The second (92) was EPB, the community-owned fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee whose deployment has helped the city envision an estimated $2.69 billion return on its initial investment.

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At the same time, regional monopolies that benefit from muted competition and oversight continued to fare poorly in the magazine’s rankings.

Expensive and usage-capped satellite broadband services fared the worst (HughesNet (14) and Viasat (14)), followed by a peppering of regional cable and telco monopolies like Comcast Xfinity (28), CenturyLink/Lumen (25), Mediacom’s Xtream (25), or Altice’s Optimum (20).

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.

State broadband officials in Massachusetts have announced over $45 million in grant awards from the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Gap Networks Program with the lion’s share going to Verizon to “expand high-speed broadband [I]nternet infrastructure to underserved homes, business, and community anchor institutions across the state.”

State broadband officials say the $45.4 million in grant awards will be coupled with $40 million in matching funds from the awardees to expand broadband access to approximately 2,000 locations in 41 Massachusetts communities.

In 2022, as we previously reported here, Massachusetts was allocated a total of $145 million in federal Rescue Plan dollars to fund the Bay State program. With the state’s first round of funding from the Gap Networks Program awarding $45 million to four applicants, about $100 million is left in the pot for future funding rounds. Massachusetts has yet to receive its $147 million share of federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, the spending rules for which are much more stringent than the more flexible CPF funding rules.

Recent federal government efforts to expand use of public Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum could be of significant help to municipalities and local communities looking to bridge the digital divide with the increasingly popular wireless technology.

CBRS spectrum refers to 150 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. In 2015, the FCC adopted rules for shared commercial use of the band, creating a three-tiered structure to avoid interference with military radar during collaborative use of the spectrum.

For municipalities, the spectrum has already proven to be a valuable way to deploy wireless access to the public. In Syracuse, New York, the city last fall launched a new public wireless network on the back of CRBS. In Longmont, Colorado, the St. Vrain Valley School District used CBRS to build a private LTE network connecting 4,000 students in partnership with NextLight, which operates Longmont's city-owned municipal fiber network.

Not all community deployments of CRBS have delivered satisfactory results for municipalities, however. The STEM Alliance in Westchester County, New York retired their efforts to deploy a CBRS network in Yonkers after they struggled with urban capacity constraints and low usage.

Surf Internet and Newton County, Indiana say they’re expanding a public private partnership (PPP) that will extend gigabit fiber access to 97 percent of the county – or roughly 3,839 Newton County households by the end of this year.

According to a joint announcement, Surf will contribute $6.6 million to the new endeavor, with the Newton County Economic Development Commission (EDC) contributing $4 million. The expansion should extend the gigabit network to Lake Township, Lake Village, Roselawn, Thayer and several additional rural areas.

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Surf Internet also provides access in Michigan and Illinois. The ISP’s service speeds and pricing can vary greatly by market, but range from symmetrical 50 Mbps (megabit per second) service for $35 a month, to symmetrical 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) service for anywhere from $70 to $80 per month, with no caps, hidden fees, or long-term contracts.

Surf Internet first came to Newton County in 2020, when it launched a $1.7 million project– funded by the FCC E-Rate program – that brought fiber connections to the North Newton School District. In 2023, Surf Internet expanded that fiber network to 382 Newton County homes as part of Indiana’s $81 million Next Level Connections (NLC) Broadband Grant Program.