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.

Lenoir City, Tennessee officials say they’re making steady progress on their goal to deliver affordable fiber well beyond the Southern city of 12,998. 

Under the collaborative umbrella of the Lenoir City Utilities Board (LCUB) and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), officials say they’re leveraging century-old experience in rural electrification to help bridge the digital divide across Knox and Loudon counties.

“We’re now in our fourth year of construction on our community broadband network, and we have 37,676 passings available at this time,” Allen Rollings, Director of Broadband at LCUB told ILSR. 

“LCUB will continue to build until our entire electric service territory is able to access our broadband service.”

LCUB’s history dates back to 1938, when Lenoir City signed a contract with the TVA to provide public power. As with many municipalities and cooperatives, this foundational "public utility" mindset helped pave the way for eventually treating broadband as a 21st-century necessity rather than a luxury.

LCUB is the eighth largest utility among the 153 Tennessee Valley Authority distributors, serving over 96,000 electricity customers.

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In 2016, LCUB built an 80-85 mile perimeter fiber ring designed to aid SCADA systems that monitor the electrical grid. Such upgrades improved the utilities’ automated metering, remote fault detection, substation monitoring and overall efficiency.

A new speed analysis published by Ookla finds that municipal broadband providers consistently leave their private Internet service provider (ISP) competition in the dust.

“Small Towns, Big Speeds: How Some Municipal Broadband Providers Outperform Their ISP Peers” examined speed test data that included some of the largest municipal networks in the U.S. from December 2024 through December 2025 and compared their performance to each other and to their privately-owned ISP competitors.

Though it wasn’t in-depth study on other aspects of performance (or business models) – but a more narrowly-focused comparison of speed among 14 municipal providers – still the analysis shines a light on a leading performance indicator: “eight municipal providers in the U.S. that we monitored using Ookla Speedtest data beat their broadband competitors in median upload speeds and one municipal provider, Sherwood Broadband, outpaced the competition in median download speeds.”

Here are some of the report’s topline takeaways:

• Fort Collins, Colorado’s Connexion was the leader in median upload speed, delivering an average median upload speed of more than 300 (Megabits per second) Mbps for the entire 13-month period from December 2024 to December 2025.
• Sherwood Broadband in Sherwood, Oregon, was the top provider in median download speeds, delivering an average median download speed that surpassed 400 Mbps eight months out of a 13-month period from December 2024 to December 2025.
• UTOPIA Fiber in Utah is a standout in latency, delivering the lowest latency of all 14 municipal broadband providers with a multi-server latency consistently in the low 6 milliseconds (ms) to 8 ms range.

The Problem With 'Unfair Competition'

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.

The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa (also referred to as Ojibwe) has officially begun construction on a foundational fiber optic broadband expansion project in northern Minnesota that is poised to bridge the digital divide for thousands of Tribal residents.

The ambitious undertaking is supported by a significant $20 million grant awarded under the 2021 Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, marking a major step forward in modernizing infrastructure for the sovereign nation.

The massive project aims to overhaul the existing connectivity landscape across the Bois Forte Reservation.

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Once completed, the new network will deliver a high-speed, future-proof up to 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber-to-the-home network to over 2,097 largely-underserved Native American households, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

Many Tribal nations were skipped over by past fiber deployments either due to outright hostility to Tribal interests, or a disinterest in the work required to align for-profit deployments with the needs and wishes of what is often multiple Tribal territories.

For Bois Forte, this new fiber network is expected to have a transformative impact across several key sectors, fundamentally improving community access to vital services:

Lehi, Utah and its partner Strata Networks say they’ve completed construction of Lehi Fiber, the city-owned, open access fiber network that’s dramatically reshaped broadband affordability and competition in the city of 80,000.

When last we checked in with the folks in Lehi back in 2022, they had just broken ground on the new network after a feasibility study by Magellan found widespread local frustration with the lack of affordable local next-generation broadband access.

Three years later, the city says they’ve completed construction of the network, which is owned by the city but managed by Strata.

Lehi Fiber Administrative Services Manager Shaye Ruitenbeek tells ILSR that they’re pleased by the community response so far.

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Residents Now Have Choice of Five ISPs

“The Lehi Fiber Network has now passed approximately 23,000 locations, and we will continue expanding as the city grows,” Ruitenbeek said. “Currently, the network supports about 6,400 subscriptions, which represents an approximate 28 percent take rate.”

New Mexico’s Office of Broadband Access and Expansion (OBAE) has announced the completion of a landmark broadband infrastructure expansion project that delivered affordable next-gen broadband access to dozens of long-neglected homes in a remote subdivision in rural Chaves County.

According to the OBAE announcement, the successful completion of the Chaves County project is OBAE’s first grant project to reach 100 percent completion, and the first Connect New Mexico Pilot Program project funded through the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Capital Projects Fund to reach the final stage.

“This project’s completion delivers on the state’s promise to connect New Mexico families in the most remote areas of the state,” said Andy Exell, OBAE’s ARPA Program Coordinator.

“For these dozens of homeowners to finally get high-speed internet is a life changer.”

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Like so many rural U.S. communities, residents of Chaves County were often deemed unprofitable to serve by entrenched private phone providers.

That changed in  2023 when OBAE awarded Artesia, New Mexico based Penasco Valley Telephone Cooperative Inc. (PVT) an ARPA grant of $487,000. Officials say construction included roughly 11 miles of pole-attached aerial fiber to the rural residences. With matching PVT funds, the broadband project’s total budget was $649,000.

The U.S. Treasury awarded New Mexico $117 million in grants through ARPA to expand and deploy broadband to unserved and underserved neighborhoods.