
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Officials in Carver County Minnesota continue to make great progress expanding affordable fiber access to the county of 111,000 residents, thanks largely to their publicly-owned open access fiber network CarverLink and their partnership with Metronet.
Since its inception in 2013, Carver County has leveraged public and private collaborations and funding with the goal of making symmetrical gigabit (1 Gbps) fiber available to all locations county wide. With the looming completion of its most recent $10.5 million expansion, CarverLink Fiber Manager Randy Lehs told ISLR they’re getting very close to their ultimate goal.
The county currently has ownership and use of nearly 1,200 miles of fiber throughout Carver County and southern Minnesota connecting more than 280 last mile public and community support locations. Many of these markets have no connectivity; many others are stuck on dated, sluggish, patchy connectivity from regional monopolies.
CarverLink doesn’t provide fiber directly to residents and businesses. Instead it long-ago established a partnership with Metronet (formerly Jaguar Communications), to provide gigabit fiber service to businesses and local residential households. Winner of PCMag's “Fastest Major ISP for 2023” award, Metronet provides multi-gigabit fiber to 300+ communities across 17 states.
“CarverLink also oversees the availability of dark fiber within our network that is available to qualified service providers or other entities using dark fiber for new opportunities–open access, open interconnect fiber,” Lehs said. “And through our open access fiber, services are also available from Broadband-MN and Arvig.”
A new provider named Halo Fiber is hoping to leverage hundreds of millions in recent Alabama middle mile broadband network grants to extend affordable fiber broadband to state residents long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
The new provider says it’s not quite ready to reveal full launch details (including target markets, speeds, or pricing), but told ILSR it should enter its first four fiber markets later this year thanks in part to a flood of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding in the state.
“We will be releasing pricing and target markets early this summer in May or June,” Halo Co-founder and CEO Brian Snider told ILSR. “Speeds are still being finalized as well but they will be symmetrical from 250 up and down to multi gig options.”
Halo says its primary focus will be to partner with public and private entities to build fast and affordable broadband networks, empower access to better education, telehealth, and economic opportunities, and ensure quality customer service in neglected markets.
“Ten years ago, myself and other members of the Halo team worked on an initiative that identified infrastructure gaps across the entire state,” Snider said in additional comments to BamaBuzz.
“We found that was a big gap in middle mile connectivity – especially in Alabama’s Black Belt where there was almost no high speed infrastructure,” he added.
Nearly a fifth of Alabama residents – or just over a million people – lack access to reliable high speed Internet.
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Wadsworth, Ohio officials say they’re making steady progress on the expansion of a city-owned broadband network that’s extending affordable fiber connectivity to the city’s nearly 25,000 residents.
Originally a coaxial-based network, the city now says it’s in the process of delivering Wi-Fi to many city residents while they go block-by-block removing older coaxial cable and upgrading residents to more future-proof fiber optic connectivity.
All told, city officials say they currently have around 5,800 existing subscribers that will ultimately be upgraded to fiber.
Wadsworth, Ohio first launched its hybrid fiber-coaxial CityLink network back in 1997, and has been offering broadband, television, and phone access to the community ever since.
In 2020 ILSR spoke with Wadsworth IT Manager Steve Lange in Episode 438 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast.
Affordable, Popular Alternatives To Monopoly Power
The network, unlike many similar deployments, is separate from the city’s municipal electric department. Wadsworth Assistant Service Director Mike Testa recently told the Medina County Gazette that the city has completed around 400 fiber installations so far, including a recently updated area along Weatherstone Drive where 120 homes were connected.
In the City of Sherwood, a mostly residential bedroom community 16 miles south of Portland, officials have been quietly cultivating a digital vineyard across Oregon’s “Gateway to Wine Country.”
As part of its on-going work to build out a citywide fiber network, Sherwood Broadband recently secured a $9 million grant from the Oregon Broadband Office Broadband Deployment Program (BDP) to continue expanding Sherwood’s municipally-owned network into neighboring rural communities just outside city limits.
The grant award is part of $132 million in federal Rescue Plan funds the state is doling out to an array of community-owned broadband initiatives for 16 projects across 17 counties.
Award winners include Beacon Broadband, a subsidiary of the Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative ($19.4 million); Jefferson County ($19.2 million); Douglas Fast Net, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Douglas Electric Cooperative ($8.5 million); the Idaho-based member-owned cooperative Farmers Mutual Telephone Company, which offers broadband service in Malheur County, OR ($18.9 million); and a handful of independent providers like Blue Mountain Networks ($6.5 million) and Ziply Fiber ($10.2 million), recently acquired by Bell Canada.
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.
The Boulder, Colorado city council has voted unanimously (9-0) in favor of striking a $9 million deal with Nebraska based ALLO Communications that should ultimately provide fast fiber access to most of the city’s 330,000 residents.
The particulars of the agreement involve ALLO leasing part of the city’s fiber network as part of a 20 year agreement. ALLO will pay Boulder a $1.5 million upfront lease payment and provide the city $2.25 per residential and $9 per business customer per month plus 1.5 percent of revenue from any wholesale lease. The total deal is estimated to be worth $9 million to the city.
“This achievement stems from a 2018 decision by the City Council to construct a citywide fiber backbone,” city officials said of the deal. “This forward-thinking initiative secured the city's future ability to support various broadband business models, ensuring long-term flexibility and growth in digital infrastructure.”
As per the deal, ALLO will provide broadband service to 80 percent of the city by 2028 and 97 percent of the city by 2030.
ALLO currently provides broadband access to more than 1.2 million customers throughout Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, and Missouri.
In deployed markets, ALLO offers locals two tiers of fiber service: symmetrical one gigabit per second (1 Gbps) for $98 a month, and symmetrical 2.3 Gbps service for $126 a month.
New York’s Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP) continues to provide grant funds to build municipal broadband networks across the state, as state broadband officials recently announced the program’s largest round of funding to date.
As we reported in June, the MIP program – specifically designed to fund municipally-owned networks as part of the Empire State’s $1 billion ConnectALL initiative – awarded $70 million to a half dozen projects earlier this summer.
Then, earlier this month, another $140 million in grant awards were announced for an additional six projects, promising to deliver “more than 1,200 miles of publicly-owned fiber optic infrastructure and wireless hubs, connecting (passing) over 60,000 homes and businesses with affordable, symmetric service – offering equal download and upload speeds at rates below regional averages.”
The funding will be used to expand broadband infrastructure (and seed competition) in the Central New York, Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley, North Country, Mid-Hudson and Western New York regions.
In a prepared press statement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul characterized the grants as “a transformative step forward in our mission to connect every New Yorker to affordable, high-speed Internet.”
Erie County, New York’s ErieNet broadband initiative is poised to begin construction in Buffalo, NY, after the Buffalo Common Council recently passed a resolution approving the Telecommunications License Agreement with ErieNet LDC. The approval is a major step toward bringing affordable next-gen broadband access to long-neglected parts of Western New York.
ErieNet is a nonprofit, local development corporation (LDC), launched in September 2022, designed to construct and manage a municipal-based open-access fiber optic backbone. ECC Technologies has been chosen to handle sales, marketing, and tech support operations for the network.
“Construction has already begun for ErieNet with underground conduit installations, and utility work necessary to make utility poles ready for ErieNet fiber optic cable attachments,” ECC Technologies’ VP Matthew Crider tells ISLR. “We expect segments of our network to come online beginning in March of 2025; and have the ErieNet 400+ mile open access network substantially built by the end of 2025.”
“Bringing high-quality broadband to Erie County begins in the City of Buffalo, and the Common Council’s approval opens up the way to make that happen,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said in a prepared statement.
Crider told ILSR that the current construction budget for the network is approximately $34 million, funded through American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) broadband grants.
Canada’s biggest telecom giant has acquired Ziply Fiber – and a sizable swath of municipal operation agreements for open access fiber scattered across the Pacific Northwest. Bell Canada and Ziply’s joint announcement indicates that the full deal will be around $5 billion Canadian, plus an additional $2 billion in acquired debt.
The acquisition could help accelerate Ziply’s planned expansion across the Pacific Northwest, where the company’s fiber network currently passes 1.3 million locations across Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State.
At the same time, Bell Canada’s history of anti-competitive behavior could herald a culture shift at the ascending provider. Ziply and Bell Canada’s rapid-fire acquisition of smaller providers across the Pacific Northwest could also risk undermining the pro-competitive benefits of the kind of open access policies Ziply previously embraced.
Ziply was formed when WaveDivision Capital purchased Frontier Communications’ Pacific Northwest operations in 2020. It has quickly become a major player across the four states thanks in part to numerous public private partnerships with municipalities, and a 2022 announcement of $450 million in new private sector funding.