First Electric Cooperative – and its broadband subsidiary Connect2First – are making major inroads on their quest to deliver affordable fiber Internet service to long-neglected portions of Arkansas.

Buoyed by an historic stretch of federal funding, the cooperative says it’s on target to deliver up to 2.5 gigabit per second service to 72,000 locations by the end of 2024.

Connect2First officials say they’ve deployed 4,371 miles of fiber across 18 counties in the southeastern part of the state, just outside of the state capital in Little Rock, delivering speeds significantly higher than seen in more urban, populous areas. The resulting service is also a notable step up in speed from regional monopolies like AT&T and Optimum, which see little market incentive to upgrade lagging networks or compete on price.

Connect2First residential customers have the choice of three tiers of service: a symmetrical 200 megabit per second (Mbps) connection for $60 a month; a symmetrical 700 Mbps connection for $60 a month; or a symmetrical gigabit per second (Gbps) service tier for $100 a month. The company’s tiers feature no service caps, hidden fees, or long term contracts.

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First Electric Cooperative, headquartered in Jacksonville, Arkansas, began in 1938 with just 3 employees and 150 members. Now with 94,000 electricity customers, it’s one of the largest cooperatives in the country, and the second biggest cooperative in the state of Arkansas.

Five years ago, the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC) announced the creation of the Firefly Broadband initiative, a subsidiary specifically built to leverage the co-op’s existing electrical assets to deliver affordable fiber to 13 underserved Virginia counties.

Half a decade later, the coop says it has successfully completed its $150 million expansion project, deployed 3,600 miles of new fiber, passed 40,000 total homes and businesses, and directly connected 20,000 state residents–many for the first time ever–in less than 52 months.

“Central Virginia Electric Cooperative partnered with Conexon to perform a feasibility study for a fiber build across their entire service territory – 13 counties and 3600 miles,” CVEC VP of Communications Melissa Gay told ILSR. “Once the target costs, offerings and take rates were determined, we chose to race to secure supplies and labor. Finding great partners has been a tremendous help to the success of our project.”

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Buoyed by numerous grants including a $28 million combination loan and grant from the USDA's ReConnect Program, Firefly now provides local residents symmetrical 100 Mbps (megabits per second) fiber for $50 a month, and symmetrical 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) service for $80 a month. There are no contracts and no data caps.

About 90 percent of households connected had no broadband access previously, according to Bruce Maurhoff, Firefly’s senior vice president and chief operating officer.

Concerns are mounting that over $2.8 billion in potential broadband grants doled out by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) could be wasted, further eroding the already well-criticized program’s disjointed effort to expand broadband access across rural America.

In 2019, the Ajit Pai FCC created the $20.4 billion RDOF with an eye on shoring up affordable broadband access in traditionally unserved rural U.S. markets. The money was to be doled out via reverse auction in several phases, with winners often declared based on having the maximum impact for minimum projected cost.

During phase one of the program, the FCC stated that 180 bidders won $9.2 billion over 10 years to provide broadband to 5.2 million locations across 49 states and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. But of the $9.2 billion in winners, over $2.8 billion has gone into default, meaning the bidder couldn’t actually deliver on promised projects. 

We've tracked the RDOF awards since the auction concluded, including for the providers that defaulted on their wins.

These issues have not only imperiled RDOF program funding, but have thrown a wrench in the works of numerous additional government efforts to shore up broadband access, from the FCC’s long-criticized quest to accurately map U.S. broadband access, to the implementation of newer grant programs overseen by other agencies.

In a release today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it was voiding applications by two of the biggest Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) bidders from December 2020. This includes more than $885 million for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) provider Starlink and more than $1.3 billion for LTD Broadband, Inc.

LTD’s original winning bids are spread across 15 states, but there has been speculation brewing since late last year from industry experts as to if funds would be released at all. We’ve seen 12 releases from the FCC since late winter authorizing funds for most of the winning bidders (from the monopoly providers to consortia of rural electric cooperatives), which we’ve collected in our Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Dashboard here. Conversely, there has been relatively little conversation about why Starlink had not yet received any of its winning bids.

Skepticism about Speed, Deployment and Cost

With so much attention on how the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Act is continuing to unfold (including from us), it’s important to remember that the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is still in the process of authorizing bids from its $9.2 billion auction conducted in December of 2020. This is for two reasons: first, because areas for which winning bids are authorized will have a much harder time going after BEAD funding. And second, because after the auction closed there was an array of bids by a variety of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which looked problematic to us - either because they were for technologies that don’t represent equitable, pragmatic solutions in the long run, or because they were won by ISPs ill-prepared to scale to the level they would need to to fulfill obligations. 

New Resource: RDOF Tracker

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was designed to bridge the digital divide in rural America by incenting deployment to households lacking access to basic broadband speeds, defined as 25/3 Megabits per second (Mbps). Phase I was operated as a reverse auction over many rounds in December of 2020, with ISPs bidding on locations throughout the country. The lowest bids won, and committed those providers to completing new connections to those addresses using RDOF support spread out over ten years.

Today we’re releasing a new resource we hope will be helpful in keeping tabs on which providers have gotten money, how much has been authorized, and in which states. The dashboard below is built on the Tableau platform, and shows the real-time results according to the latest authorization spreadsheets released by the FCC.

Over the past eighteen months, southeastern-Mississippi based Dixie Electric Power Association (Dixie EPA) has gone from presenting its initial buildout plans for a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network, all the way to connecting its 5,000th subscriber. Because of electric cooperatives like Dixie that are getting organized and prioritizing connectivity for their members, Mississippi is likely to become one of the states with the best rural connectivity within the next five years.

Founded in 1938 in Laurel, Mississippi, Dixie EPA’s present-day coverage area stretches across southeastern Mississippi in parts of Covington, Jasper, Jones, Clarke, Wayne, Perry, and Forrest counties. The cooperative provides electric service to 30,000 premises. 

In September 2020, about six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Dixie began pre-registering subscribers for Internet service under the cooperative’s newly-created subsidiary, DE Fastlink. Dixie was part of a collective of electric cooperatives that had just received a recent state appropriation of $65 million in CARES Act funding for rural broadband deployment. The funding was administered under the Mississippi Electric Coop Broadband Covid Grant Program by Mississippi Public Utilities. Dixie planned to match in full its own $3.3 million award, which, according to the terms of the grant, had to be spent by the end of that year. 

In this episode of the Connect This! Show, co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) are joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) to talk about current events in broadband.

The panel will reflect on RDOF: one year later, how demands for remote work are fueling the broadband boom, and the latest news in broadband.

Subscribe to the show using this feed on YouTube Live or here on Facebook Live, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us broadband@muninetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

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