The popular Vermont Communications Union District (CUD) Northwest Fiberworx (NWFX) has received a $20.2 million infusion in state American Rescue Plan Act dollars to extend affordable fiber broadband into long-underserved regions of the Green Mountain State.

The St. Albans-based CUD is a nonprofit special purpose municipality with 22 member towns. Its latest build will connect 3,800 unserved and underserved households in Franklin and Grand Isle counties in the Northwest part of the state.

Great Works Internet Vermont (GWI VT) will design the network and manage the operations, though Fiberworx will own the finished build.

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“We have a unique model, that of which we will build, own and maintain a fiber-to-the-premise open-access network,” Northwest Fiberworx Network Operations Manager, Mary Kay Raymond said in a statement.

The new $20.2 million grant awarded late last month by the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCCB), was made possible by 2021 federal COVID relief funding courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act.

“Northwest Fiberworx and their partner Great Works Internet Vermont have found a way to bring service where others would not,” VCBB Deputy Director Rob Fish said of the award.

“They’re building a sustainable network to serve Vermonters for decades to come.”

In partnership with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, today ILSR releases a new report examining how the state of Vermont is supercharging its telecommunications infrastructure efforts to reach the unconnected by puttings its weight behind community broadband-driven efforts.

The report - Neighborly Networks: Vermont's Approach to Community Broadband [pdf] - traces the emergence of a unique public-public partnership arrangement that first appeared in the Green Mountain State in 2008. The Communications Union Districts (CUD) model first emerged more than a decade and a half ago among a coalition of towns in the eastern part of the state long-ignored by for-profit Internet Service Providers. There, a collection of community broadband champions came together to prove that the solution to the broken marketplace lay internal to east-central Vermont. ECFiber, a publicly owned, nonprofit ISP was borne of that effort, and began bringing affordable, fast, reliable service to households in the region.

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Ten years later, when the state began formulating a plan for the future of Internet access, the progress made by and lessons learned from ECFiber drove a landmark shift in public policy in the state. Volunteers emerged, towns voted, and CUDs were placed at the center of Vermont’s effort to bridge the infrastructure gap in the state. Today, there are ten CUDs covering 216 towns across the state, and Vermont’s leaders have put the lion’s share of public funds behind the communications union district model.

Tracing the history of this effort from 2008 to today, this report breaks down the conditions that led to this sea change, where the CUDs are at today, and how we might learn from the Vermont case to improve Internet access elsewhere across the country.