Alton, Illinois officials say they’ve struck an expanded agreement with AltonWorks, a company built specifically to revitalize the city and deal with residents’ longstanding frustration at the lack of affordable, next-generation broadband access.

Altonworks was created in 2018 by local attorney John Simmons as a “social impact development company,” tasked with revitalizing the city of 25,000. The provider was created on the back of a $20 million grant authorized by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO).

“This project’s impact extends way beyond Alton,” DCEO Assistant Director Cameron Joost recently said at the project’s unveiling. 

“It’s a model for communities across Illinois approaching broadband infrastructure with vision, partnership, and commitment to equity.”

Altonworks is partnering with i3 Broadband, which broke ground on a new $25 million FiberNet project. FiberNet is projected to reach 94 percent of the city's residents with fiber broadband speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps). The $25 million fiber build is slated to be completed sometime in 2027.

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The deployment comes to a community where broadband access is primarily dominated by entrenched incumbent telecom giants like Charter Communications and AT&T. A lack of real competition has resulted in spotty access, slow speeds, high prices, and substandard customer service.

Chicopee Electric Light (CEL) has chosen Sertex Broadband Solutions to help the Massachusetts-based municipal utility expand access to affordable fiber across the city of 55,000. The agreement is an extension of a 2019 deal with Sertex to help the utility launch residential broadband services under the Crossroads Fiber brand.

Frustrated by a lack of affordable broadband access, the city tabbed Magellan Advisors in 2015 to conduct a feasibility study into city-provided broadband access. 

After a survey showed a majority of city residents would support such an initiative, Chicopee Electric Light launched Crossroads Fiber in the summer of 2019 in a small pilot area.

Since then, the utility has been expanding access steadily to the rest of the city – joining a growing roster of city-owned utilities that are responding to broadband market failure by taking matters into their own hands.

Two dozen California cities are making progress bringing affordable fiber to 16,500 new locations in the Golden State. The collaborative middle mile project, dubbed the Gateway Cities Council of Governments' (GCCOG) Gateway Cities Fiber Optic Network Project, could revolutionize connectivity for a broad swath of Californians long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

While the project should be transformative, questions remain if the project will reach the full potential of its original 2021 vision after some significant revisions were made to California’s expansion plans in the summer of 2023.  

The $104 million broadband infrastructure project is leveraging money from the California Department of Technology’s Middle Mile Broadband Initiative and the California Public Utilities Commission’s Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program (FFA).

Both are part of a broader $6 billion California “Broadband For All” initiative aimed at boosting broadband competition and driving down broadband access costs statewide. The initiative in turn was enabled by 2021 federal infrastructure and COVID relief legislation resulting in a generational flood of historic broadband subsidies.

All told, the $104 million Gateway Cities Fiber Optic Network Project aims to connect 24 cities, 4,254 unserved locations, and as many as 16,500 locations with 74 miles of next-generation gigabit-capable fiber. The network will also bring faster fiber connectivity to 72 anchor institutions and public safety entities scattered across Southeast California.

For years, it’s been known as “America’s first Gig City,” thanks to its city-owned fiber network. 

That same infrastructure has positioned Chattanooga to potentially become the nation’s first “Quantum City,” according to a new economic impact analysis showing EPB Fiber and the utility's smart-grid systems has generated $5.3 billion in net community benefits for Hamilton County since 2011. 

The city is now poised to enter the Quantum realm.

The research builds on an earlier 10‑year return‑on‑investment analysis – published in August 2020 – that showed the city’s publicly-owned fiber network had delivered $2.69 billion in value over its first decade. 

The new follow-up study – From Gig City to Quantum City: The Value of Fiber Optic Infrastructure in Hamilton County, TN 2011-2035 – expands the time horizon and finds that over 15 years the total community benefit has grown to $5.3 billion, illuminating how the long‑term value of municipal broadband can really pay-off.

A Massive Economic Boost

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Conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the study finds that the municipal fiber network has dramatically reshaped the regional economy, supporting 10,420 jobs from 2011 to 2024 – about 31 percent of all net new jobs created locally over the past decade.

The return on investment has been extraordinary: the network has delivered 6.4 times the value of its original $396 million investment, the study indicates.

A new study shows that the now expired Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which offered a $30/month discount for 23 million eligible households to pay for home Internet service, helped low-income Americans get better access to jobs, with particularly strong effects for women.

The ACP program ended in May 2024 – thanks to GOP Congressional leaders blocking efforts to allocate additional money when the fund was depleted. Still, the study remains relevant as affordability advocates continue to look for ways to fund a similar program in the future.

Led by Hernan Galperin, Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the research combines ACP administrative records with data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). In doing so, the study’s authors found that access to affordable, high-speed Internet improves employment outcomes by enabling remote work and greater labor market participation.

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With millions of Americans who rely on remote work to balance jobs with caregiving responsibilities, the study indicates that the ACP appeared to be a key enabler.

Traverse City, Michigan’s public, community-owned utility, Traverse City Light and Power (TCL&P), is putting the finishing touches on its $14 million plan to deliver affordable fiber to the community of 15,424. With build out estimates significantly lower than initial projections, the utility is finalizing an additional $1 million in loans to fund the recently started expansion project.

Already named last month to the 2025 Broadband Communities Top 100 list, a recent update by the city notes that the utility is currently extending the network to the Base of Old Mission Peninsula, Hastings, Parsons, Munson, and Barlow. 

Complete citywide deployment is expected by the Spring of 2026, though the city says it maintains a “stretch goal” of completing the entirety of the “rapid deployment” by this fall.

In deployed markets, locals have three speed and pricing options: a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $90 a month; a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month; and a symmetrical 200 Mbps option for $60 a month.

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None of the options come with long-term contracts, hidden fees, or usage caps. All three broadband tiers can be bundled with phone service for an additional $10 a month.

Like countless U.S. communities, Traverse City locals were tired by expensive, spotty, substandard broadband access being provided by regional telecom monopolies. In Traverse City that usually means a monopoly on broadband access by Charter Spectrum, peppered with some scattered Brightspeed (formerly Lumen and Centurylink) DSL and fiber lines.

Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NTIA administrator Arielle Roth said last week that the agency she oversees will withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation similar to New York’s Affordable Broadband Act.

As the assistant secretary overseeing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, Roth’s legal reasoning is striking.

All the more so given that the New York Affordable Broadband Act that requires Internet service providers in the Empire State to offer a low-cost broadband service plan to income-eligible households has been upheld as Constitutional – a case in which the Supreme Court twice declined to intervene and overturn.

Yet, last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment. During her speech, Roth said:

“Consistent with the law, which explicitly prohibits regulating the rates charged for broadband service, NTIA is making clear that states cannot impose rate regulation on the BEAD program. To protect the BEAD investment, we are clarifying that BEAD providers must be protected throughout their service area in a state, while the provider is still within its BEAD period of performance. Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”

The stakes are high for broadband affordability advocates across the nation. 

Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000.

When we last checked in with Superior back in April, the city was working with Nokia for final configuration and testing before launch. Now, the municipal broadband network says its ConnectSuperior fiber network is live in its first two target neighborhoods in the northern part of the city (see the city’s latest deployment map).

The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure. Historically such a model helps boost competition and drive down costs for both consumers and competitors. That’s already the case in Superior, where the city’s website lists two providers – Advanced Stream and Superion Networks – with more on the way.

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Advanced Stream is offering locals three tiers of service: a symmetrical 300 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical one gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $83 a month.

Superion is offering three tiers of service as well: a symmetrical 300 Mbps tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical 1 Gbps tier for $85 a month. Both companies offer phone bundles for a modest additional surcharge.

Studies consistently show that the primary reason millions of households do not have home Internet service boils down to affordability.

Research by EducationSuperHighway indicates that of the estimated 28.2 million households in the U.S. that do not have high-speed Internet service, 18 million of those households (home to 48 million Americans) are not online because the cost of service is simply too expensive.

But now, thanks to a recently published study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, broadband affordability advocates may be able to more accurately measure the elusive nature of affordable broadband costs.

The study also examines how to better pinpoint contributing factors like the state of local infrastructure and how lower-performing broadband access technologies powerfully influence low-income households' decision to sometimes choose cellular service-only over home Internet service.

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“Broadband Affordability: Assessing the Cost of Broadband for Low-and-Moderate Income Communities in Cities” provides a research-driven lens on how to measure broadband affordability neighborhood by neighborhood, city to city.

“While national and state-level analyses have helped highlight the digital divide,” the study’s author Ambika Nair writes, “measures of broadband affordability at the community level are limited.”

Innovative digital equity nonprofit DigitalC has been working for years to shore up affordable broadband access in underserved cities like Cleveland, Ohio. 

Now the organization is enjoying new momentum for its plans to expand fixed wireless broadband access in the city thanks to a $500,000 cash infusion from tech giant Google. According to a recent announcement, the donation includes next-generation Fixed Wireless Access (ngFWA) equipment from Tarana, which will allow DigitalC to expand its Canopy home broadband service – which provides symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) at $18 a month – to even more neighborhoods in Ohio.

The nonprofit just celebrated the connection of its 6,000th household in Cleveland, a city once ranked the worst-connected large city in the U.S. by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA).

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“This meaningful investment from GFiber adds bandwidth to our capacity to scale the Cleveland Model,” DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds said of the cash infusion. “This community-based blueprint proves that next-generation technology can be deployed quickly, trusted deeply, and scaled effectively to deliver the superior internet experience more communities deserve.”