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.

Fort Collins, Colorado has repeatedly won awards for being a trailblazer in the municipal fiber space, and local subscribers continue to take notice. The city-owned and operated Connexion network operation just announced it has passed the 20,000 subscriber mark, after nabbing a significant new wave of state and federal funding for expansion earlier this year.

Fort Collins began thinking about a citywide fiber deployment as early as 2012. By 2015, locals had voted to exempt the city from a counterproductive state law restricting communities from building their own broadband networks.

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Construction of the municipal network began in 2018. Subscribers began to connect to the network in 2019, and by 2023 fiber service was available to every last home and business in the city of 169,000.

Thanks to local leaders, city residents now have access to some of the fastest, most affordable broadband available anywhere, including symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $70 a month; symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month; and symmetrical 10 Gbps service for $200 a month. Connexion service comes with no usage caps or long-term contracts.

As part of its celebration of reaching 20,000 subscribers, Connexion officials say they will give away a year of free Internet access to 20 subscribers chosen at random. 

To mark the occasion, Chad Crager, Executive Director of Fort Collins Connexion, said:

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).

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 towns of Dryden and Caroline, New York have been awarded a new $8.9 million broadband grant courtesy of the New York State ConnectALL program. The award will help deliver affordable fiber capable of symmetrical speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to residents of both towns, which until now, had been trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Launched two years ago, Dryden officials have told ISLR they’re making steady inroads on municipally-owned fiber deployment to the town of 14,500. Now they’re looking to expand the popular local broadband network further into the town of nearby Caroline.

According to an announcement by Dryden Fiber, this latest grant award will help fund the construction of over 125 miles of new fiber to reach 2,650 new residences in Dryden and Caroline. The first customers in Caroline are expected to be online sometime within the next twelve months.

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“I find a real partnership between the Town of Dryden, Town of Caroline, and the New York State ConnectALL Office,” Dryden Fiber Executive Director, David Makar says of the award. “Years of hard work and seed planting from elected officials, citizen volunteers, and private partner businesses are now showing up ready to provide top-tier quality broadband service for the residents of Dryden and Caroline.”  

Last October, Vermont CUD (Communications Utility District) Lamoille FiberNet greenlit a $25 million public partnership with Consolidated Communications. The goal: to finally bring affordable fiber broadband access to 4,170 locals in Lamoille County. Eight months later and locals say network construction is finally getting underway.

According to the Lamoille County News And Citizen, Consolidated trucks have started to appear in towns like Stowe, Johnson, Eden, Cambridge, Belvidere and Waterville as Phase 1 of the network build gets underway.

Consolidated crews plan to deploy more than 400 miles of fiber this summer, providing locals with speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).

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“It’s been a Herculean effort for more than three years, so we’re all very excited to see the trucks rolling this summer,” Lamoille FiberNet Executive Director Lisa Birmingham told the outlet.

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.