Traverse City, Michigan’s public, community-owned utility, Traverse City Light and Power (TCL&P), is putting the finishing touches on its $14 million plan to deliver affordable fiber to the community of 15,424. With build out estimates significantly lower than initial projections, the utility is finalizing an additional $1 million in loans to fund the recently started expansion project.

Already named last month to the 2025 Broadband Communities Top 100 list, a recent update by the city notes that the utility is currently extending the network to the Base of Old Mission Peninsula, Hastings, Parsons, Munson, and Barlow. 

Complete citywide deployment is expected by the Spring of 2026, though the city says it maintains a “stretch goal” of completing the entirety of the “rapid deployment” by this fall.

In deployed markets, locals have three speed and pricing options: a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $90 a month; a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month; and a symmetrical 200 Mbps option for $60 a month.

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None of the options come with long-term contracts, hidden fees, or usage caps. All three broadband tiers can be bundled with phone service for an additional $10 a month.

Like countless U.S. communities, Traverse City locals were tired by expensive, spotty, substandard broadband access being provided by regional telecom monopolies. In Traverse City that usually means a monopoly on broadband access by Charter Spectrum, peppered with some scattered Brightspeed (formerly Lumen and Centurylink) DSL and fiber lines.

Antelope Valley, California officials are hoping to leverage California’s historic recent round of broadband grant programs to deliver affordable fiber access to a significant swath of long-underserved southern California desert communities.

According to Antelope Valley officials, they’ve applied for a $24.3 million California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Broadband Infrastructure grant to help them deliver symmetrical 10 Gigabit Passive Optical Network (XGS-PON) technology to 988 total households, most of which would be seeing affordable fiber access for the first time ever.

A breakdown of the project included in the application submitted by the Antelope Valley Union High School District to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), indicates that the proposed project seeks to connect to the California State Middle Mile route at two points currently being negotiated in collaboration with state Middle Mile Authorities.

“The award will not be determined until approximately quarter two of next year,” Antelope Valley Union High School District Superintendent Greg Nehen tells ILSR.

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The Antelope Valley Broadband Project would be constructed with 100 percent underground fiber installation, with all fiber-optic cables placed in buried conduit within public rights-of-way, using underground microducts, handholes, and splice enclosures. No aerial deployment is planned for this project, according to project leaders.

Decorah, Iowa has struck a public private partnership with West Union Trenching to deploy a modern fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that passes every household in the city.

The project is the culmination of decades of planning and frustration at the lack of affordable, next-generation broadband in the city of 7,500.

According to the city, the Decorah 2025 Fiber to the Home Project will finally begin construction early next year.

The city has also struck a deal with Minnesota-based AcenTek to operate the system and provide retail internet service to residents. Network equipment and construction is being financed by a $13.7 million loan approved last month by the city’s Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board of Trustees.

“The fiber plant and electronics will be city owned, our operations side of it is being handled by Acentek,” Chopper Albert, Decorah IT Director told ISLR.

The first subscribers are expected to come online sometime in early 2027. The project’s origins extend back more than a decade after locals struggled to gain access to affordable, fast, and reliable broadband access.

“This is a unique start-up arrangement for Iowa,” said Travis Goedken, City Manager of the City of Decorah.  “After reviewing multiple business plan options since the successful election by Decorah residents in 2015 to establish a Board-governed municipal telecommunications utility, this was the most favorable option.

"City staff and the Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board have been working diligently the last two years to organize and execute the necessary steps to make this a reality.”

Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000.

When we last checked in with Superior back in April, the city was working with Nokia for final configuration and testing before launch. Now, the municipal broadband network says its ConnectSuperior fiber network is live in its first two target neighborhoods in the northern part of the city (see the city’s latest deployment map).

The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure. Historically such a model helps boost competition and drive down costs for both consumers and competitors. That’s already the case in Superior, where the city’s website lists two providers – Advanced Stream and Superion Networks – with more on the way.

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Advanced Stream is offering locals three tiers of service: a symmetrical 300 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical one gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $83 a month.

Superion is offering three tiers of service as well: a symmetrical 300 Mbps tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical 1 Gbps tier for $85 a month. Both companies offer phone bundles for a modest additional surcharge.

This week Wisconsin Public Radio aired a story that looked at the city of Superior, Wisconsin and its city-owned open access fiber network, known as ConnectSuperior.

Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Richelle Wilson not only spoke with city officials about how "the new network has been a game-changer for Superior," Wisconsin Public Radio also reached out to our Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks initiative.

Chris provided context and insight on how the rapidly changing federal policy landscape may or may not affect ConnectSuperior, how state preemption laws hinder communities in Wisconsin and some other states from duplicating Superior's success, and how tribes in Wisconsin have participated and benefited from a recent Tribal Broadband Bootcamp in the Upper Peninsula.

Listen to the Wisconsin Public Radio story here.

In addition to Wisconsin Public Radio's story on ConnectSuperior, you can check out our extensive coverage of ConnectSuperior here. 

Or, you can listen to ConnectSuperior Broadband Manager Stephanie Becken on our Community Broadband Bits podcast go more in-depth into the city’s quest to deliver affordable access to city residents below:

Vineland, New Jersey officials say they’ve secured a $3.7 million grant from the state that will help expand fiber and wireless broadband access to the city of 62,000. Local officials are hopeful the grant is just the beginning steps toward dramatic expansion of affordable access.

Vineland’s new grant was made possible by the New Jersey Broadband Infrastructure Deployment Equity (NJBIDE) grant program. NJBIDE will be delivering $40 million in broadband grants via the state’s Capital Projects Fund (CPF), made largely possible by the 2021 federal passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

NJBIDE grants prioritize fiber optic infrastructure of 100 megabytes per second (Mbps) and mandates the provision of at least one low-cost option (not specifically defined by New Jersey) to serve low income communities – something increasingly important in the wake of the federal government’s retreat from efforts to ensure equitable and affordable broadband. (Still early in the process, the city has not yet determined the exact pricing and service tiers the network will offer once construction is complete).

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A 2024 city proposal indicates that city leaders want to spend between $35 and $40 million to create a citywide broadband network, starting with a citywide fiber ring. The city paid for a viability study from Bonfire that found that at least 42 percent of the City does not have access to viable, quality, affordable broadband service.

Officials in Bountiful, Utah say they’ve completed the city’s $48 million open access fiber network a year ahead of schedule, bringing fast, affordable broadband access to the Salt Lake City suburb of 45,000.

“We have completed the Bountiful City fiber project and built out the entire city with an open access network,” Utopia Fiber Executive Director Roger Timmerman recently said at the Fiber Connect Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. “This was a three-year project, and we completed it nearly a full year ahead of schedule.”

In a unanimous city council vote in the summer of 2023, officials approved $48 million in bonds to fund construction of the city-owned open access fiber network. 

Like UTOPIA’s broader network, the city then leases access out to numerous independent ISPs, creating a massive influx of competitive, affordable last mile fiber access.

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The city of Bountiful owns the network while UTOPIA designed, built and manages the network and takes a share of the revenue.

Thanks to the partnership, locals now have access to 14 different competing broadband providers, offering symmetrical and affordable 250 megabit per second (Mbps), 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), 2.5 Gbps, and 10 Gbps tiers – plus a $38 to $44 local network access charge.

UTOPIA officials say the network currently passes around 16,500 addresses, and they’ve been seeing 200 signups per month.

“We need a year to really answer that question,” Timmerman said when asked for specifics on area adoption rates. “In Bountiful we’re confident we’ll get take rates of 40% or higher. There’s a lot of demand there.”

Syracuse, NY officials say the city’s community-owned broadband network Surge Link continues to dramatically expand two years after the network first launched, bringing affordable broadband access to the city of 145,000 – with a particular eye on helping the city’s disadvantaged.

A recent update from the city states that the network now serves more than 9,200 households in Syracuse, located in central upstate New York. The latest expansion brought the service into the city’s Valley, Skunk City, Washington Square, Northside, Prospect Hill and Hawley-Green neighborhoods in early July.

The Surge Link initiative is part of a broader $15 million investment into fixed-wireless access broadband infrastructure into a city traditionally left underserved by giant regional telecoms.

A lack of competition between dominant regional monopolies Charter (Spectrum) and Verizon has resulted in spotty access, high prices, and slow speeds.

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The lion’s share of Surge Link’s latest expansion was made possible by a $10.8 million grant from the New York State ConnectALL initiative, a multi-layered billion-dollar project to dramatically boost high speed Internet access across the state leveraging a series of new grant programs, education initiatives, broadband mapping improvements, and digital equity proposals.

In the wake of a federal abandonment of most meaningful Internet equality efforts, California municipalities continue to take the fight for equitable broadband access into their own hands. 

That includes Sonoma County, California, where county officials have freshly greenlit expanded plans to provide free broadband access to low income residents.

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Target: Affordable Housing

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors recently announced that it has approved a list of new affordable housing sites that are eligible to receive free Internet for one year.

According to the county, 556 low-income Sonoma County households across 10 different housing locations should qualify for the free broadband service.

The deployments are being made possible by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which continues to result in some fairly transformative fiber deployments countrywide.

“The Board has prioritized finding creative solutions to broadband infrastructure development in Sonoma County,” Board of Supervisors Chair Lynda Hopkins says of the effort.

“This free internet program is a step toward equity as we continue to pursue public funding and strategic partnerships that can finally close the digital divide facing many of our shared communities.”

In early 2023, Dryden, New York, formally launched the town’s municipal broadband network, becoming the first municipality in the state to provide residents with direct access to affordable, publicly owned fiber.

A year and a half later, and the town of 14,500 says they’ve just signed up their 400th subscriber and continue to make steady progress expanding the popular network into rural enclaves in and around Dryden long deemed “unprofitable” by regional telecom monopolies.

Dryden Fiber Executive Director David Makar tells Ithaca-based local news outlet 607 News Now that the first year and a half of operations focused on building the core fiber ring around the city.

They’ve since shifted to the time-consuming task of extending last mile fiber access out to rural unserved and underserved homes in Dryden and nearby Caroline (population 3,321).

“There’s about 500 households between Dryden and Caroline that if they want to get online – it’s dial up modems, like it’s the year 2000,” Makar says. “Since we are very rural…there’s no easy way to get a lot of these houses,” he notes, indicating that the logistics and permissions for rural pole attachments have been unsurprisingly time consuming.

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Makar said there’s about 800 homes currently waiting for access in many of these rural areas.