It was a big week for ECFiber as Vermont’s first – and oldest – Communication Union District (CUD) celebrated lighting up the last hub of its 1,500 mile-network in White River Junction.

To mark the occasion of connecting the “golden patch cord” that will extend high-speed Internet service to eight more communities in the Upper Valley region, White River Junction’s VFW Hall was packed this past Tuesday with CUD officials, local and state leaders, enthusiastic residents, and U.S. Sen. Peter Welch. They were there to celebrate what ECFiber officials liken to “the Golden Spike moment tying the first transcontinental railroad together.”

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After a 30-piece band played marching tunes, ECFiber Chairman F.X. Flinn marched to the podium to describe the meaning of the moment.

"It’s come to fruition today with a lighting of the White River Junction hub," he said. "This is the last piece of the puzzle for the network we originally envisioned that would bring world-class broadband to every home and business in the 23 member towns that originally voted town meeting day 2008 to create ECFiber."

Sen. Welch, an ECFiber subscriber who also spoke at the event, credited the state’s community broadband approach as the linchpin to solving the state’s digital divide:

“If we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes and get us Internet, we’d be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren. It wasn’t going to happen.”

Eight More Towns Join CUD 

Lots of food-for-thought, with seasoned broadband bits, are served up on our Connect This! Show.

Apropos to yesterday’s BEAD allocation announcement, here’s a sample from Episode 72.

In that episode, ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative Director Christopher Mitchell and the livestream crew discuss whether federal policy disincentivizes new small broadband providers by setting up barriers to the historic amount of grant funds being made available, favoring the big incumbent providers and their entrenched regional monopolies.

You can watch the full episode below:

Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC) has begun construction on an ambitious new fiber deployment that will soon bring affordable, multi-gigabit fiber access to all of the cooperative’s existing electrical customers in rural Northern Florida.

Cooperative officials tell ILSR its three-phase build out is well underway, with a beta anticipated this summer and the first commercial customers connected by August. SVEC Communications Director Jon Little says the cooperative’s goal remains to deliver affordable fiber to all 20,000 of the cooperative's current electric customers by the end of 2026.

“We’ve broken our territory into three phases based partly on population or possible customers,” Little said.

The cooperative’s recently created subsidiary, Rapid Fiber Internet, will interface directly with subscribers, while Conexon manages deployment of more than 4,100 miles of fiber. Electrical users won’t see price hikes; the projected $93 million deployment cost will be funded by a combination of grants and loans paid back exclusively through user subscriptions.

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Little told ISLR that make ready (preparing utility poles for fiber attachments) prep and engineering for phase one are complete, and make ready construction for phase one is roughly 40 percent complete. He added that primary fiber construction for phase one is roughly twenty percent complete.

“We’re hoping that we will have a group of beta customers starting next month,” Little said. “We want to go about a month to get their feedback, and so we’re still hoping sometime in August to offer hookups to our members on that first feeder.”

Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced how it will allocate $42.5 billion in BEAD funds to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five territories.

At an “Investing in America” event today at the White House, President Biden noted that this “biggest investment in high-speed Internet ever” was noteworthy “because for today’s economy to work for everyone, Internet access is just as important as electricity was, or water or other basic services.”

And in a press statement, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communication and Information Alan Davidson, who is overseeing the NTIA program, added: “This is a watershed moment for millions of people across America who lack access to a high-speed Internet connection. Access to Internet service is necessary for work, education, healthcare, and more. States can now plan their Internet access grant programs with confidence and engage with communities to ensure this money is spent where it is most needed.” 

Our initial reaction is as follows:

"The BEAD allocations amount to the largest ever single federal investment to deploy needed Internet infrastructure across the United States. The question now is: how many states will maximize the moment and be inclusive of municipal broadband, public-private partnerships, and community-driven initiatives vs. those states who will simply dole out the funds to the big monopoly providers and hope for the best?”

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 Wisconsin, Republican state lawmakers voted earlier this month to kill Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to invest $750 million of Wisconsin tax dollars to expand high-speed Internet infrastructure across the Badger State.

Republicans on the state legislature’s budget committee voted to reject the proposed broadband funds, arguing that the state should wait for Wisconsin’s forthcoming share of the $42.5 billion in federal BEAD funds instead.

Although the state has a record budget surplus projected at more than $7 billion, it’s the first time in the past decade the GOP-controlled state legislature has not allocated funds to expand broadband, which drew a blunt rebuke from Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback.

“It’s outrageous that Republicans have absolutely nothing to show for plans to actually address the pressing challenges facing our state — embarrassing doesn’t begin to cover it,” Cudaback told the Wisconsin State Journal.

The state is expecting to receive between $700 million and $1.1 billion in BEAD funds from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) with the state's Public Service Commission (PSC) estimating the total cost of deploying expanded broadband infrastructure statewide to be about $1.8 billion.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a $17.5 million grant to NEK Community Broadband (NEK Broadband), providing another shot in the arm for Vermont’s fast-growing collection of Communications Union Districts (CUDs). Such CUDs continue to play a starring role in Vermont’s efforts to finally conquer the digital divide.

NEK Broadband’s latest grant comes from the USDA’s ReConnect Loan & Grant Program, which helps defray the costs of network hardware and broadband deployment to rural and traditionally underserved U.S. markets.

The program this week doled out an additional $714 million in grants and loans to projects across 19 states.

NEK Broadband officials say its $17.5 million award will be combined with a $5.8 million investment to deliver affordable fiber access to 3,295 homes, 94 businesses, 183 farms and 11 educational facilities across 22 towns in Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex counties in Vermont.

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“For too long, large pockets of our state have been denied this critical resource because companies haven’t found it profitable enough to invest,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said in an announcement of NEK’s latest grant. “This federal funding is transformative, because the money is going directly to the very communities who will benefit, instead of having to go through those who care more about profits than delivering service.”

The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) insists that the 17 state laws that hamper nationwide community broadband deployments won’t delay a massive looming infusion of infrastructure broadband subsidies. But one industry group isn’t so sure.

BroadbandNow, a website dedicated to tracking the U.S. broadband industry, issued a report claiming that state restrictions on community broadband networks could delay the delivery of more than $42.45 billion in BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment) grants made possible by the recently-passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

Such bills, often ghost written by the telecom industry by policy and lobbying intermediaries, often limit the construction or financing of community broadband networks, even in unserved areas that regional telecom monopolies have long neglected.

Covid’s home education and telecommuting boom highlighted the restrictive and often counterproductive nature of such bills, leading two states — Arkansas and Washington — to remove the barriers. And in Colorado earlier this month, Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 23-183 into law that eliminates an older 2005 law backed by regional telecom monopolies, which imposed cumbersome and onerous restrictions on Colorado towns and cities looking to build better, more affordable community-owned and operated broadband networks.