The ​​soundproofed privacy pod tucked inside the first floor of the Rural Edge affordable housing development may be one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure built in Vermont since the state’s Communications Union Districts (CUDs) first began deploying fiber networks.

With a population of just over 500 Vermonters living in the small town of Groton — where the nearest hospital is a 30-minute drive away and not every conversation can or should be overheard at home — the fiber-connected privacy pods are small enough to fit just two people, but private enough for life-enhancing online conversations to be had.

“Groton is where the largest percent of folks are without high speed Internet access. It’s highly unserved, except for downtown,” explained Christa Shute, Executive Director of NEK Broadband, which recently combined with the CVFiber CUD to form a 72-town telecommunication utility district now providing fiber Internet service across some of the most rural parts of the most rural state in the U.S.

Thanks to the commitment of Groton volunteers and town leaders and their intimate knowledge of their community – backed with the resources of the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCCB) — “we knew what addresses didn’t have service,” Shute tells ILSR, fresh off the weekend’s grand opening celebration of the Groton Connectivity Hub, which also featured a live fiber splicing demo, online safety presentations, and drop-in tech help for the public.

The Okanogan County Electric Cooperative (OCEC) and the Okanogan County Public Utility District (PUD) say they’re making steady progress on bringing affordable fiber broadband access to Okanogan County, a highly rural stretch of rugged land in Washington state on the border of Canada.

According to the organizations, the coalition is poised to bring next-generation fiber to as many as 1,366 peppered along the upper Methow Valley this year starting near Chewuch River and ending at Lost River. Many of these areas will be seeing fiber upgrades for the first time ever after years stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

According to a presentation at a town hall last month, officials stated that the project will include 98 miles of underground fiber deployment and 88 miles of new aerial fiber deployment. A mainline backbone fiber between Twisp and Winthrop is completed and functional, providing a redundant loop feed of fiber between the two areas, they stated.

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Construction on the project started back in March, and should be completed by the end of the year, OCEC’s contractor, Shawn VanGeystel of Cannon Construction, recently told the Methow Valley News.

The electrical cooperative’s fiber arm is named MethowNet. It offers three tiers of fiber service, though pricing varies slightly between the North and South Valley.

Daunted by the high costs of building its own municipal fiber network, Flagstaff Arizona instead struck a public private partnership (PPP) in late 2024. A year and a half later and that partnership is starting to drive significant new fiber deployments and some significant new investment to the city of 77,000.

Or that’s at least the conclusion of a new whitepaper by the Fiber Broadband Association, a policy coalition of municipal broadband networks and key fiber industry giants such as Adtran, GFiber, Corning, Calix, and Graybar.

The analysis, "Broadband Community Profile: A Public-Private Partnership for Fiber – Flagstaff, Arizona," explores how the PPP the city struck Arizona-based Wecom Fiber is expected to inject at least $100 million into local economy over five years while saving the city an estimated $18 million in capital expenses.

Frustrated by market failure and a lack of meaningful broadband competition among regional telecom monopolies, Flagstaff considered building its own municipal fiber network in 2023. But city officials found that even just connecting 34 city-owned buildings (estimated to be around $20 million) would be untenable given budgetary constraints.

Roanoke Cooperative’s Fybe has been awarded $2.4 million in state funds to expand affordable access to high speed Internet to 826 locations across eight predominantly rural North Carolina counties that for years have been left lingering in a broadband desert.

Fybe, the cooperative's fiber business, will receive $2.4 million through the state’s Stop-Gap Solutions program to connect 826 locations across Bertie, Chowan, Gates, Granville, Halifax, Hertford, Martin, and Northampton counties. The fiber expansion is expected to be completed by the end of 2026.

“This investment allows us to continue expanding reliable, high-speed internet to rural communities that need it most,” Fybe President Bo Coughlin recently said of the expansion. “Access to broadband is essential for education, healthcare, business growth, and everyday life, and we’re proud to be part of the effort to ensure more North Carolinians can stay connected.”

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North Carolina’s Stop-Gap Solutions program is designed to reach hard-to-access locations and close gaps in broadband coverage. The program is administered by the North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity and is funded primarily through the federal 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

The remote islands of San Juan County, Washington are increasingly being served with next-generation fiber and wireless thanks to Rock Island Communications (RIC), a locally-owned Internet subsidiary of the Orcas Power & Light Cooperative (OPALCO).

Part of a member-owned, cooperative utility that’s been providing electricity to the county since 1937 – RIC is celebrating a decade of what it calls “remarkable growth” for the tall task of remote island deployments to the county of 18,000.

The subsidiary says it just reached 7,000 subscribers across San Juan County, and that its annual revenue has grown dramatically during the last decade – from approximately $1.8 million in 2015 to more than $12.3 million in 2025.

“Over the past decade, Rock Island has also achieved several important financial milestones that demonstrate the success of OPALCO’s long-term vision,” OPALCO’s Krista Bouchey says of the expansion. “The company became cash-flow positive in 2020, and in 2023 and 2024 achieved positive net income, marking a major turning point after years of investing in infrastructure and growing its subscriber base.”

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The San Juan Islands are clustered in the most northwest tip of Washington state, off the coast of the cities of Bellingham and Anacortes, not far from the Canadian border. A little more than a third of the residents of the 20 islands are seasonal, and the lion’s share of the territory is only accessible by ferry.

Pennsylvania’s Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) says it’s making steady inroads in expanding affordable fiber access throughout rural Bradford and Wyoming Counties, where many frustrated locals have been stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide for the better part of a generation.

Not long ago, Claverack joined a growing roster of electric cooperatives that are extending into broadband access, often leveraging the experience and expertise that informed their efforts at rural electrification almost a century earlier. According to Claverack officials, they recently passed a notable milestone: the cooperative just wrapped up a project that delivered 100 miles of new fiber-optic cable to pass roughly 1,300 previously-unserved and underserved homes and businesses in rural Bradford and Wyoming counties.

“We were proud to share this milestone with the people who made it possible,” Steve Allabaugh, Claverack REC president and CEO, said of the project. “Years of planning, investment, and collaboration brought us to this moment.”

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The Wysox, Pennsylvania-based cooperative currently services a 2,250‐square‐mile territory across eight counties in Northeastern Pa. (Bradford, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Lycoming, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming counties), maintaining more than 2,800 miles of electrical power lines and delivering electricity service to over 19,000 paying members.

Last May, we shared a dashboard we built to track how community networks were doing in California's Last-Mile Federal Funding Account broadband grant program. With a new round of winners recently announced, we've updated our dashboards to show who, where, and how much community networks are getting. In the first round, they were seeing unprecedented success, punching far above their weight in comparison to the monopolies (which have a long track record of success in landing the bulk of state broadband grant dollars across the country). 

We're happy to say that the latest round shows community networks doing equally well. In late 2025 and early 2026, California announced an additional nine grants. Every county in California has now received grant funding for last-mile broadband expansion. Two of the awards were multi-county projects, stretching to include counties that were also served through the first round of funding.

Hoopa Valley Utility Authority was a big winner again, selected for a nearly $40 million award to serve areas of Trinity and Humboldt Counties. The project, called Hoopa TRAIL for Hoopa Trinity Rural Access Initiative Linkup, will serve nearly two thousand locations with gigabit symmetrical speeds. Taken together, community networks secured half of the awards and funding announced in this round. Other awards went to the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, for a planned public-private partnership, Comcast, AT&T, a regional Internet service provider, and a unique nonprofit-private partnership. Altogether, over $110 million was awarded in this round of grants, bringing the running total in the program to $1.23 billion.

Vermont’s Communications Union Districts (CUDs), which were the subject of a 2024 ILSR report, continue to make steady inroads in delivering high-quality broadband access to long-neglected rural Vermont residents. 

That includes the Chittenden County Communication Union District (CCCUD), which recently announced the completion of a planned fiber extension into the heavily rural communities of Essex Town, Essex Junction, Jericho, Shelburne, Westford, and Williston.

The deployment was completed in partnership with Fidium Fiber, which says the expansion brought fiber optic connectivity to more than 1,900 homes and businesses across the six towns for the first time ever.

Users in these markets have the option of three tiers of service: a symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for a promotional rate of $30 a month; a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for a promotional rate of $50 per month; and a symmetrical 2 Gbps option for a promotional rate of $60 per month. Those prices jump to $70, $110, and $125 per month when the promo period ends.