By any measure, 2025 was a tough year in the grand project to extend fast, affordable, reliable broadband access to every home in the United States. The Digital Equity Act was abruptly cancelled, BEAD was restructured, small- and large-scale outages were common, and prices from the monopolies rose yet again.

But good things happened, too. In 2025, we saw seven new municipal broadband networks across the country that were lit up for service. As is usual, it was a mixture of partnerships, business models, and construction approaches to meet the unique challenges of a patchwork broadband landscape.

A Bountiful 2025 for Municipal Broadband

In California, the Gateway Cities Fiber Optic Network launched (eventually covering 23 cities); it will eventually cover 72 community anchor institutions and almost 5,000 unserved locations across member cities with the help of state grants.

Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD) continues to expand its popular open access fiber network, bringing affordable next-generation broadband access to island locals long trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

“Kitsap PUD is accelerating its community-owned, open-access fiber build, with new distribution nodes coming online by early 2026, expanding capacity and reaching more underserved addresses,” the organization states in a recent update.

KPUD provides water, wastewater, and Internet service on Bainbridge Island and the neighboring peninsula in the Puget Sound in Washington state.

In 2016, officials long-frustrated by substandard regional broadband access decided to finally build an open access network that continues to expand, and now brings affordable gigabit fiber to locals via a half-dozen different competing broadband ISPs.

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An updated KPUD case study indicates that the existing network is currently comprised of more than 900 miles of fiber, with 21 new distribution nodes coming online early 2026. That node expansion is being heavily aided by $6.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding. According to officials, each node is capable of serving between 1,920 and 7,680 addresses.

Construction of the expansion is underway now, and is expected to be completed sometime in 2026.

Clallam County, Washington and Astound Broadband have begun construction on a major new joint partnership that will bring affordable fiber access to more than 1,500 homes across the largely rural Northwestern part of The Evergreen State.

In a joint announcement, Astound states that it will be deploying more than 100 miles of fiber across long-neglected Clallam County, starting with a 15-mile deployment along the State Route 112 Highway corridor, beginning just west of Port Angeles.

The deployment is a joint collaboration between The Public Utility District (PUD) No. 1 of Clallam County, Astound Broadband, and the Northwest Open Access Network (NOANet), a nonprofit coalition developed by regional Washington Communications Utility Districts (CUD) to bring more reliable, affordable fiber access to neglected rural Washington communities.

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Clallam county uses the NOANet fiber optic system for real-time metering, energy management, load control, and networking among remote utility facilities, though they’re keen to leverage the open access network to help provide last mile residential service.

The new $22 million fiber investment is being funded by a combination of a $16 million grant from the the Washington State Broadband Office made possible by the American Rescue Project Act (ARPA), $4.5 million from the Washington State Department of Commerce Public Works Board Broadband Program, and $1.7 million in funding from Clallam County.

The expansion will provide last mile fiber access to at least 1,500 new local residents, but will also prioritize bringing fiber to fire houses, schools, libraries, medical clinics, and other key anchor institutions in the county of 78,000.

Grays Harbor PUD, a wholesale telecom utility in Washington state, says it’s getting to work leveraging a $7 million grant from the Washington State Broadband Office to expand affordable fiber access in the South Elma, Porter, and Cedarville areas of the Evergreen State.

Grays Harbor PUD was one of 16 Washington utilities chosen by the Washington State Broadband Office to receive grant funding during awards first announced back in 2023.

The $6.9 million grant is helping the PUD run fiber along State Route 12, using existing utility poles to expand the service possibilities for customers in South Elma, Porter, Cedarville, and surrounding areas. Once complete, the PUD is expected to lease fiber access to roughly a dozen Internet service providers, serving more than 500 new locations.

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The construction is being built in partnership with Paramount Communications, and officials are warning locals to expect some construction delays as crews get to work across the impacted parts of Grays Harbor County on the western side of Washington state.

“The Grays Harbor PUD appreciates your patience and understanding as we complete this project,” Grays Harbor PUD Telecom Business Coordinator Sara Travers says in an announcement. “Our teams are committed to working safely and efficiently to bring improved broadband services to your area.”

The Port of Whitman County in Washington state has received a new $2.9 million grant it says will help dramatically expand affordable fiber access to the heavily rural county of 48,000. The Port of Whitman’s broadband expansions have traditionally been open access, which allow multiple competitors to compete over shared, community owned infrastructure, driving down costs.

The latest funding, from the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Community Economic Revitalization Board (CERB) will support the construction of dark fiber to approximately 109 additional unserved and underserved locations in Whitman County.

According to the county announcement the project, supported by $622,441 in local matching funds, will construct last-mile fiber infrastructure along Sunshine Road east of Pullman, along Kitzmiller Road north of Pullman, and west of Tekoa. The build outside of Tekoa will bring fiber to the Port of Whitman County’s Tekoa industrial site, which the Port acquired in 2023.  

“The Port is excited to partner with CERB on this broadband project,” said Kara Riebold, Port of Whitman County Executive Director.

“This continues our efforts to bridge the digital divide in rural Whitman County. We know that reliable broadband is no longer a luxury but a necessity for economic growth and are grateful for CERB’s continued investment in broadband across Washington State.”

In Washington State, several Public Utility Districts – including the Port Of Whitman County, the Port Of Coupeville, and the Port of Skagit in Skagit County – have leveraged millions in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grants to deploy community-owned open access fiber, choosing Ziply as their operational partner.

Canada’s biggest telecom giant has acquired Ziply Fiber – and a sizable swath of municipal operation agreements for open access fiber scattered across the Pacific Northwest. Bell Canada and Ziply’s joint announcement indicates that the full deal will be around $5 billion Canadian, plus an additional $2 billion in acquired debt.

The acquisition could help accelerate Ziply’s planned expansion across the Pacific Northwest, where the company’s fiber network currently passes 1.3 million locations across Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State.

At the same time, Bell Canada’s history of anti-competitive behavior could herald a culture shift at the ascending provider. Ziply and Bell Canada’s rapid-fire acquisition of smaller providers across the Pacific Northwest could also risk undermining the pro-competitive benefits of the kind of open access policies Ziply previously embraced.

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Ziply was formed when WaveDivision Capital purchased Frontier Communications’ Pacific Northwest operations in 2020. It has quickly become a major player across the four states thanks in part to numerous public private partnerships with municipalities, and a 2022 announcement of $450 million in new private sector funding.

As the federal government makes unprecedented investments to expand high-speed access to the Internet, unbeknownst to most outside the broadband industry is that nearly a third of the states in the U.S. have preemption laws in place that either prevent or restrict local municipalities from building and operating publicly-owned, locally-controlled networks.

Currently, there are 16 states across the U.S. (listed below) with these monopoly-protecting, anti-competition preemption laws in place.

These states maintain these laws, despite the fact that wherever municipal broadband networks or other forms of community-owned networks operate, the service they deliver residents and businesses almost always offers faster connection speeds, more reliable service, and lower prices.

In numerous cases, municipal broadband networks are able to provide low-cost or free service to low-income households even in the absence of the now expired federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). And for several years in a row now, municipal networks consistently rank higher in terms of consumer satisfaction and performance in comparison to the big monopoly Internet service providers, as PCMag and Consumer Reports have documented time and time again.

Nevertheless, these preemption laws remain in 16 states, enacted at the behest of Big Cable and Telecom lobbyists, many of whom have ghost written the statutes, in an effort to protect ISP monopolies from competition.

The Infrastructure Law Was Supposed to Move the Preemption Needle But …

While Posit Conference 2024 notes that “not all superheros wear capes,” our Senior GIS Analyst Christine Parker will be flying into Seattle, Washington this week to join a breakout session at the annual gathering of open source data scientists.

Christine will join a panel of data analysts to discuss Data Wrangling for Advocacy: Tidy Data to Support the Affordable Connectivity Program.

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Her focus will be on how the ILSR Community Broadband Networks research team used “messy datasets” to create the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) dashboard and how by doing so made ILSR one of “the few organizations that worked with these data to translate them into meaningful insights.”

The two-day conference, slated to begin tomorrow, offers virtual tickets to view the live stream of all keynotes and sessions.

Christine’s session is slated for August 14 from 2:40 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT.

Registration is still open here.

Full agenda here.
 

As the municipal broadband movement continues to gain momentum, we created a new fact sheet to highlight the dramatic surge in the number of communities building publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure over the last three years.

In January, we announced our updated tally of municipal broadband networks across the U.S., which showed that between January 2021 and January 2024 at least 47 new municipal networks had been lit up for service.

Our census of new municipal broadband networks comes while dozens of other projects are still in the planning or pre-construction phase, which includes the possibility of building 40 new municipal networks in California alone.

The new fact sheet not only contains pertinent numbers to illustrate the rising tide of municipal broadband networks, it also includes snapshots of four recently launched networks now providing service to communities hungry for high-quality Internet connectivity and competitive choice.

You can find the new Rising Tide of Municipal Broadband fact sheet here.

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Community Broadband Resource Pairing