The home Internet service with the fastest speeds in Colorado isn’t coming from Comcast or Quantum Fiber. 

It’s coming from the city-owned fiber network in Loveland.

On International Internet Day (October 29), Pulse Fiber announced the launch of its new 20 gig residential Internet service — the first provider in the Centennial State to offer symmetrical 20 gigabits-per-second home connectivity.

Branded as Vector Fiber, the new ultra fast tier introduces a connection capacity that is a rarity for residential offerings — something Pulse officials say is “designed for a niche but growing segment” in the Front Range city of about 80,000.

“Vector Fiber is ideal for residents who push the limits of what a home connection can do,” said Brieana Reed‑Harmel, Loveland’s broadband division manager. “Whether they’re running a business out of their home, managing massive datasets, or developing the next breakthrough technology, 20 Gigs ensures they never hit a ceiling.”

The new service offers features typically reserved for commercial-grade connectivity. In addition to 20 Gig symmetrical speeds, it comes with a professional SFP handoff — a small pluggable fiber port for the home router that lets subscribers use all 20 Gigs without a data bottleneck. The service also provides a static IP address — a permanent Internet address that allows end-users to host websites, servers, automation hubs and to remotely access files, cameras, and home systems.

“The result is a high‑performance platform built for residents whose technical requirements exceed what standard home [I]nternet services can deliver,” officials said of the new service. “Comparatively, the majority of [I]nternet providers nationwide do not offer plans in excess of 10 Gigs.”

Who Needs 20 Gigs?

This is not your father’s broadband conference.

It’s CNCon in Seattle, an inaugural gathering for those running community networks or looking to start connecting people the big monopoly providers have left digitally disconnected.

Registration for the November 20 in-person event — Community Networks Conference (CNCon) 2026 — is now open here.

Hosted by the Seattle Community Network and Local Connectivity Lab, conference organizer Esther Jang tells ILSR the gathering will be geared for community network operators to geek out, “share, learn from each other, and build together,” adding that they are also putting out the call to community network aficionados who have closed shop and can talk candidly about why, and what went wrong.

“Building community-based networks is rewarding but incredibly challenging, and we want to create a support network for these groups to work together and strategize towards common goals,” Jang said.

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Big Tent Approach

“For this first conference, we are taking a big tent approach,” Jang says. “We want to be inclusive of folks with broadband projects as well as those who are operating emergency or disaster resilience networks, to see what we might all have in common.”

Attendees will explore tradeoffs in network operations — fun vs need vs profit — and address differences between working with fiber, fixed wireless, mesh, and Long Range Radio (LoRa) Internet access technologies.

Construction on the regional expansion of Sherburne’s municipal open-access fiber network is advancing across neighboring Chenango County borders, backed by a $6.9 million state grant intended to turn a local pilot project into a regional community-owned utility model.

The project, branded Sherburne Connect, originated as an early municipal fiber deployment operated in coordination with the village’s century-old public electric utility, Sherburne Electric, after being designated in 2022 as one of four initial municipalities (alongside Nichols, Diana, and Pitcairn) to participate in New York State’s $1 billion ConnectALL initiative.

Partnering with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and Empire State Development, the village shared an initial $10 million state pilot allocation to engineer a publicly owned open-access fiber network utilizing Sherburne Electric’s existing poles, bucket trucks, and municipal rights-of-way.

This project initially passed roughly 1,800 to 2,000 premises inside the village of Sherburne and immediate electric territory. Village of Sherburne Board of Trustees meeting minutes from last June indicate that the core network in Sherburne now has more than 1,000 active subscribers.

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Those same meeting minutes indicate that Sherburne officials had requested a deadline extension but were denied it by Albany. “Superintendent [Travis] DuBois said Sherburne is furthest ahead with this fiber project than the other 13 systems and Albany want to show at least one project closed out by year end,” the minutes indicate.

Willmar, Minnesota officials say they’re making steady progress on construction of the city’s planned $24.5 million open access fiber network, with the first residential and business customers slated to come online sometime later this year.

Dubbed Willmar Connect, construction of the city-owned fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network broke ground in May 2026, marking a pivotal turn from years of feasibility studies and council debates to actual directional boring, conduit placement, and fiber splicing.

When we last checked in on Willmar back in March, the city council had just voted 4-3 to sign off on the $24.5 million open access project. After a summer of steady construction the city says it’s making meaningful progress toward a full commercial launch.

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“We expect to light up our first users on the network this year,” Willmar City Administrator Kyle Box tells ILSR.

Phased Construction Starting From GO (Bond)

Construction of the network is occurring in three phases.

Phase one of the project, focused on Southwest Willmar, is budgeted for between $7.6 million to $9.2 million. This phase of the project will focus on backbone construction, neighborhood conduit boring, lateral connections, and converting a former municipal wastewater facility into the network operations center (NOC).

Three months after town meeting voters in Longmeadow, Massachusetts rejected an $8.6 million proposal to kickstart the construction of a municipal fiber network, Town Councilors in the neighboring town of East Longmeadow moved in a different direction, voting to take control of its digital future and provide its residents and businesses with next-generation Internet access.

The move was formalized earlier this month when East Longmeadow Town Councilors unanimously approved issuing $43.5 million in bonds to finance the construction of a municipally-owned fiber network. 

The vote paves the way for the western Massachusetts town of about 16,000 to finally get the affordable and reliable town-wide Internet connectivity local leaders see as vital for its economic future and improved quality-of-life.

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With pent up frustration of the high cost and unreliable service under the monopoly of Charter Spectrum, the Council also voted to enter into an agreement with Westfield Gas & Electric to build the network, as the municipally-owned fiber provider has done for nearly two dozen other towns in western Massachusetts — with the utility’s subsidiary, Whip City Fiber, to operate as the Internet service provider.

Construction is expected to start in January of 2027 with the first connections lit up for service later that year in the northwest corner of town where the “initially designated (and most dense) neighborhoods” are located.

Six Years in the Making

For years, the conventional playbook for communities stuck with slow, expensive Internet service has been to wait. Wait for the incumbent cable or phone company to upgrade connections, wait for a federal grant, wait for someone else to solve the problem. 

Now, a growing number of communities have decided they are done waiting.

And on July 7 at 12 noon ET, the next installment in a joint webinar series from the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) will showcase a new financing model being put into action that allows for communities to control their digital futures.

The free, one-hour live webinar to be broadcast on ILSR's YouTube channel — "Control + Shift + ALTernative: Building Community-Owned Fiber" — will go behind the scenes of two real-world community fiber projects to tease out the practical lessons that other communities can learn from.

Registration for the webinar is now open here.

The webinar will be moderated by Gigi Sohn, one of the country's foremost telecommunications policy experts and head of AAPB, and Sean Gonsalves, Senior Writer and Associate Director for Communications with ILSR's Community Broadband Networks Initiative.

Together they will lead a conversation with four practitioners who have been in the trenches of community broadband development: Jim Cannon, CEO of Pivot-Tech; Scott Corbitt, General Manager of the Port of Lewiston; Christina Burns, Kendall County Administrator; and Chris Perlitz, Managing Director at Municipal Capital Markets Group, Inc.

California community leaders, activists, and a coalition of partners gathered earlier this month to celebrate the launch of a new broadband infrastructure project at Sequoia Courts and Sequoia Courts Terrace in Fresno, bringing free high-speed Internet access to more than 350 residents.

The plan to bring broadband access to residents at no cost was made possible through a partnership with Fresno Housing, Fresno Coalition for Digital Inclusion (FCDI), United Way Fresno & Madera Counties, and Central Valley Community Foundation (CVCF). The Fresno Housing Authority will own and maintain the finished network.

The expansion, which leverages a hybrid fiber-wireless approach, was directly funded by California’s ambitious Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at dramatically boosting broadband competition and access across the Golden State. Much of that effort was funded, in part, by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

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The Fresno grant was for $471,000, with $1,000 or less per unit cost to build, according to details on the project included in a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) filing, which notes that the enterprise-grade wireless mesh network used in the project was more costly, but provided “flexibility and scalability for future expansion.”