Officials in Bountiful, Utah say they’ve completed the city’s $48 million open access fiber network a year ahead of schedule, bringing fast, affordable broadband access to the Salt Lake City suburb of 45,000.

“We have completed the Bountiful City fiber project and built out the entire city with an open access network,” Utopia Fiber Executive Director Roger Timmerman recently said at the Fiber Connect Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. “This was a three-year project, and we completed it nearly a full year ahead of schedule.”

In a unanimous city council vote in the summer of 2023, officials approved $48 million in bonds to fund construction of the city-owned open access fiber network. 

Like UTOPIA’s broader network, the city then leases access out to numerous independent ISPs, creating a massive influx of competitive, affordable last mile fiber access.

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The city of Bountiful owns the network while UTOPIA designed, built and manages the network and takes a share of the revenue.

Thanks to the partnership, locals now have access to 14 different competing broadband providers, offering symmetrical and affordable 250 megabit per second (Mbps), 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), 2.5 Gbps, and 10 Gbps tiers – plus a $38 to $44 local network access charge.

UTOPIA officials say the network currently passes around 16,500 addresses, and they’ve been seeing 200 signups per month.

“We need a year to really answer that question,” Timmerman said when asked for specifics on area adoption rates. “In Bountiful we’re confident we’ll get take rates of 40% or higher. There’s a lot of demand there.”

Syracuse, NY officials say the city’s community-owned broadband network Surge Link continues to dramatically expand two years after the network first launched, bringing affordable broadband access to the city of 145,000 – with a particular eye on helping the city’s disadvantaged.

A recent update from the city states that the network now serves more than 9,200 households in Syracuse, located in central upstate New York. The latest expansion brought the service into the city’s Valley, Skunk City, Washington Square, Northside, Prospect Hill and Hawley-Green neighborhoods in early July.

The Surge Link initiative is part of a broader $15 million investment into fixed-wireless access broadband infrastructure into a city traditionally left underserved by giant regional telecoms.

A lack of competition between dominant regional monopolies Charter (Spectrum) and Verizon has resulted in spotty access, high prices, and slow speeds.

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The lion’s share of Surge Link’s latest expansion was made possible by a $10.8 million grant from the New York State ConnectALL initiative, a multi-layered billion-dollar project to dramatically boost high speed Internet access across the state leveraging a series of new grant programs, education initiatives, broadband mapping improvements, and digital equity proposals.

Hudson, Ohio officials are now accepting bids on a promising new fiber-to-the-home network that should dramatically improve affordable, next-generation broadband access in the city of 23,000.

It’s just the latest effort by a city that has been exploring the option of municipal broadband infrastructure for more than a decade.

Just 15 miles north of Akron, the city has spent the better part of the last three years preparing to forge a new public-private-partnership (PPP) to expand access.

The city already owns and operates its own broadband network (Velocity Broadband, launched in 2015), but it exclusively serves the city’s businesses with gigabit-capable fiber.

The city’s new partnership would leverage that existing business network and core fiber assets to finally bring fiber optic connectivity to the city’s residents.

“The proposed work includes the installation of new fiber optic infrastructure, including approximately 11,750 lineal feet of 1.5-inch underground HDPE fiber conduit via horizontal directional drilling, 7,900 lineal feet of new aerial fiber, the placement of underground fiber vaults and handholes, and the subsequent fiber optic cable installation and testing,” the city’s proposal states.

The CBN team's Associate Director for Communications Sean Gonsalves recently published a piece in ProMarket about the continuing consolidation of telecommunication markets and why municipal broadband is a better option. He writes:

"Last month, AT&T announced it would acquire all of Lumen Technologies’ fiber internet business for $5.75 billion. According to a company statement, the purchase will net AT&T one million fiber customers and significantly expand its fiber footprint in Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.

Across AT&T and Lumen’s service areas, where they offer wired or licensed fixed wireless Internet service, more than half of the locations they claim to serve have two or fewer options for high-speed internet service.

Good news for AT&T stockholders. Not so good news for broadband-hungry subscribers who, for years now, have been paying among the highest prices for internet service of any developed nation in the world. Ever wonder why that is? The answer is as painfully obvious as our overpriced monthly internet bills.

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When big telecom giants consolidate—especially in a market where most people have only one or maybe two internet service providers (ISPs) to choose from—the results are predictable: without meaningful competition for something as fundamental as internet connectivity in an internet-connected world, monopolists have no incentive to improve service, invest in network upgrades, or compete on price.

Superior, Wisconsin officials say they’re getting very close to lighting up the first subscribers of a city-owned fiber network that will finally bring affordable, next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000.

“We have phase 1 in the ground and are working with Nokia right now for final configuration and testing,” Stephanie Becken, broadband manager for ConnectSuperior, tells ILSR.

“It's our plan to have our sign-up website ready in the next two weeks, as our two ISPs finalize their connections and offerings pages,” she says. “I'm hopeful we'll have drops and initial service started by mid-May, but we may be looking at June—there's always something!”

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In 2020 the city passed a resolution declaring fiber essential infrastructure. In 2021, the city council voted overwhelmingly to move forward on a deployment master plan developed for the city by EntryPoint Networks.

In 2023 the Superior city council voted 8-1 to approve deployment in the project’s first pilot area: a swath of around 830 homes and businesses lodged between Tower Avenue, Belknap Street, and North 21st streets. But the phase 1 target area has expanded a little since as the city has moved forward on logistics and planning.

The city of Willmar, Minnesota (est. pop. 21,000), has voted to move forward on plans for a city-owned open access fiber network. The $24.5 million investment, which saw finalized approval by the Willmar city council earlier this month with a 4-3 vote, aims to drive accountable, affordable, fiber access to long underserved parts of the city about 100 miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

In its 4-3 vote in early March, the City Council opted to continue work on the Connect Wilmar Initiative, something it says is an answer to the ongoing failures by regional incumbent telecom monopolies to provide uniform, high quality, high speed, affordable Internet access.

“Local internet providers were not interested in improving Willmar's internet infrastructure,” the city says. “After soliciting proposals, the city chose to partner with Hometown Fiber, aligning with Willmar’s long-term vision to provide fast, reliable internet through an open-access fiber network.”

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The decision to move forward on the network comes after several years of careful planning, starting with the creation of a city broadband committee in September of 2022, and a mapping of local broadband access (or lack thereof) completed in December of 2022.

Oswego County, NY officials are celebrating the award of a new $26 million New York State grant aimed at dramatically expanding affordable fiber access to long-underserved rural communities in the northwestern part of the state, just north of Syracuse.

According to the announcement by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, Oswego’s latest grant award will help fund the deployment of 345 miles of new fiber infrastructure to largely rural unserved regions, helping to bring affordable broadband access to nearly 11,000 homes, businesses and community institutions across 22 towns and villages.

Oswego County will own the finished open access network and lease the fiber to Internet Service Providers (SPs), including Empire Access, "on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis."

Empire, a family-owned ISP and named the fastest ISP in the nation by PCMag in 2021, currently offers local residents symmetrical 500 Megabit per second (Mbps) service for $50 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $65 a month; and symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently unveiled plans to improve public safety, housing, and the overall livability of the Big Apple.

Among them is $6 million in new funding to expand the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) “Neighborhood Internet” network, providing free Internet to an additional 2,000 households receiving Section 8 rental assistance.

The city hopes that the program, which is first focused on expanding Internet access to low-income households in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, will ultimately be expanded to reach as many low income NYC residents as possible. But the effort still remains a far cry from the bolder, bigger, “master plan” initiative scrapped by the Adams administration in 2022.

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Low income city residents simply need a library card to connect to the NYPL network in the limited parts of the city where access is currently being offered. The NYPL has experimented with Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), fixed wireless, and some fiber for connectivity. The program also provides low income users with a Chromebook with Wi-Fi access.