Chanute City Commission decided on June 9th to take the next step to bring ftth to the community; Commissioners voted unanimously to pursue and finalize funding to deploy a municipal network.

The City's current fiber network provides connectivity to schools, hospitals, electric utility and municipal facilities, the local college, and several businesses. Chanute has worked since 1984 to incrementally grow its network with no borrowing or bonding. Plans to expand the publicly owned infrastructure to every property on the electric grid began to take shape last year.

At a work session in May, Director of Utilities Larry Gates presented several possible scenarios, associated costs, and a variety of payback periods. The favored scenario includes Internet only from the City, with video and voice to be offered by a third party via the network. Residential symmetrical gigabit service will range from $40 - $50 depending on whether or not the subscriber lives in the city limits. Commercial service will be $75 per month. Advanced metering infrastructure will also be an integral part of the network.

The Commission authorized the pursuit of up to $14 million to get the project rolling.

The Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, serving a five county rural region, plans to begin offering gigabit service in its territory by the end of 2014. The cooperative has formed Bolt Fiber Optic Services to offer connectivity to approximately 32,000 homes and businesses.

According to Light Reading, the infrastructure is funded with a $90 million loan from the Rural Utilities Service. Sheila Allgood, manager of Bolt, notes that the entity is separate, but "profit or loss will go back to the co-op."  Bolt will offer triple-play packages with a third party contracted to offer the VoIP services.

The project also includes a data center, already under construction, that will house network equipment and provide collocation services.

From the cooperative's newsletter announcing the project in December 2013:

The initial phase of the project will deliver fiber in areas of the largest population density (14-20 homes per mile) with subsequent phases eventually working their way into more remote, outlying areas. “We anticipate that the first phase of the project should be available to roughly one-third of Northeast Oklahoma Electric Co- operative’s membership,” explained Due. “A significant number of businesses and community institutions in our area would also be connected during this phase.”

The cooperative lists monthly residential prices as 20 Mbps for $49.99 per month, 50 Mbps for $63.99 per month, 100 Mbps for $83.99 per month, and 1 Gbps for $249.99 per month. All speeds are symmetrical. Bolt is asking interested customers to sign up with a $100 installation fee.

Project completion is scheduled for April 2017.

The Cooperative has produced a short promotional video to get the word out:

LUS Fiber recently announced it now offers residential symmetrical gigabit services for $69.95 per month when purchased as part of its triple-play. In addition to the new speed tier, LUS Fiber will double speeds for current customers for a modest increase of $5 per month.

Claire Taylor of the Advertiser reports that every customer will see the change except those signed up for the 3 Mbps service designed for lower income customers.

DSLReports quoted Director Terry Huval:

“There’s very few entities in the country that can offer this amount of speed,” says Huval. The decision to roll out the new plan came after a recent test run in which LUS opened up full-speed to check if the system could handle the higher demand. It did, says Huval. "Our system has grown and matured to a point where we can make these types of offers,” says Huval, adding that eventually a similar deal for a Gig-per-second will be offered to commercial customers.

Other options include 20 Mbps for $33.95 per month and 80 Mbps for $54.95 per month. The rate for stand alone gigabit Internet is $109.95 per month.

For the full story on the LUS Fiber network, download our case study, Broadband At the Speed of Light: How Three Communities Built Next-Generation Networks.

We also encourage you to listen to Chris' interview with John St. Julien from Lafaytte. In episode #94 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, he shares his experience as one of the people spearheading the effort to bring the network to Lafayette.

Last summer we reported on Sebewaing, the community of 1,700 in the tip of the "thumb" in Michigan. At the time, Sebewaing Light and Water (SLW) was exploring the possibilities of deploying its own FTTH network. Like other small communities, Sebewaing could not get the service it needed from large corporate providers. We recently caught up with SLW's Superintendent, Melanie McCoy, to get an update.

The community released its RFP [PDF] and received responses from two bidders. McCoy tells us that in Michigan, such a low response rate allows the municipality to deploy its own network, so SLW decided to proceed.

The construction bid for the fiber backbone went to Earthcom, located in Lansing. Air Advantage successfully bid to supply bandwidth and the headend. Calix will provide the customer premise equipment that will offer data and voice services.

Sebewaing's network is 90% aerial and the final estimate is $1-2 million. The network will provide 1 gig capacity with the potential to expand to 10 gigs. Because the utility has its own poles and in-house expertise to handle labor, SLW is able to perform make-ready work themselves, lowering the final cost of the deployment. SLW will use an interdepartmental loan from its electric, water, and wireless utilities to fund the investment. According to McCoy, the RFP responses were both about $1 million higher than the final estimate.

In 2003, SLW began providing wireless Internet access to residents in Sebewaing so staff has experience as a broadband utility. They also installed a small fiber loop in the downtown area to serve businesses and municipal facilities. The old fiber loop will be retired because it has fewer strands and has been maxed out for some time.

The new fiber will replace connections between fifteen public facilities, including wells, public safety, and administration buildings. Each facility currently pays only $15-25 per month to be connected, saving thousands in yearly fees for leased lines from incumbents. Rates will not change, even though the new network will offer higher capacity.

The Logan Journal recently reported that the Russellville Electric Plant Board (EPB) now offers gigabit service to local businesses. The article notes that Net Index, an online tool to measure download and upload speeds, recognizes EPB as the first Gig city in Kentucky. To learn more about the community and its network, we talked with Robert White, General Manager of EPB.

The community of 7,000 is the county seat of south central's Logan County. Russellville is located in the center of several other larger communities: Nashville, Bowling Green, Hopkinsville, and Clarksville, Tennessee. Manufacturing has been a large part of the local economy for generations, but community leaders recognize the vulnerability of a narrow economic base. In order to encourage a versatile economy, Russellville invested in its telecommunications utility.

The community wants to encourage small business while simultaneously providing manufacturers the connectivity they need. Leadership sees the ability to remain competitive directly tied to their network. In addition to the economic development opportunities a fiber network can provide, communities like Russellville rely on electricity revenue from large consumers. Retaining the large electric consumers that also provide jobs in the community is a must.

Russellville's electric utility created a strong advantage when it was time to venture into telecommunications. EPB had already established a strong relationship with its Russellville customers, says White, and locals felt they could trust their municipal electric provider.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded a Knight Prototype Fund grant to the Civic Cloud Collaborative of Burlington, Vermont.

The Civic Cloud Collaborative is a group of eight organizations using Burlington's gigabit network to create civic and public spaces. The group describes the Civic Cloud project on their website:

The Civic Cloud will be available for the community to use as a platform for public, non-commercial Internet applications and digital creative works. Several applications will be deployed during an initial prototyping phase of the Civic Cloud. High-definition live streaming will be provided for community media outlets to webcast live public meetings and cultural events. WordPress websites will be hosted for several Vermont non-profits including rescue squads, food shelves, job banks and historical societies. A collection of volunteer-developed applications and a state-of-the-art website deployed to the Civic Cloud will help Big Heavy World preserve and promote Vermont-made music. Lakecraft, an educational, multi-user game aimed at youth and adults that gamifies the Lake Champlain Basin, will also be one of the first applications to run on the Civic Cloud.

Vermont Public Radio also reported on the award. From the article:

“We’re interested in it being a non-commercial space on the Internet,” said Bradley Holt, a Burlington-based developer who heads CodeForBTV, the local chapter of Code For America, an organization for public service software developers.

The cloud service, Holt said, will provide hosting capacity for local community organizations seeking to use the Internet to advance the public interest.

For more, check out the press release from Code for BTV, one of the collaborative members.