Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD) continues to expand its popular open access fiber network, bringing affordable next-generation broadband access to island locals long trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

“Kitsap PUD is accelerating its community-owned, open-access fiber build, with new distribution nodes coming online by early 2026, expanding capacity and reaching more underserved addresses,” the organization states in a recent update.

KPUD provides water, wastewater, and Internet service on Bainbridge Island and the neighboring peninsula in the Puget Sound in Washington state.

In 2016, officials long-frustrated by substandard regional broadband access decided to finally build an open access network that continues to expand, and now brings affordable gigabit fiber to locals via a half-dozen different competing broadband ISPs.

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An updated KPUD case study indicates that the existing network is currently comprised of more than 900 miles of fiber, with 21 new distribution nodes coming online early 2026. That node expansion is being heavily aided by $6.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding. According to officials, each node is capable of serving between 1,920 and 7,680 addresses.

Construction of the expansion is underway now, and is expected to be completed sometime in 2026.

The city of Williston, Florida is joining the ranks of municipalities across the nation that are building their own fiber broadband networks with an eye on ubiquitous, affordable access. City leaders say they’re preparing to launch a city-owned $4.6 million fiber optic ISP to break the local telecom monopoly logjam and finally provide fast, affordable access to the local populace.

Earlier this year the Williston city council voted unanimously on a $4.6 million loan to help fund a Williston Fiber network that will reach all 3,433 local residents. Last December, the city held a city council meeting to finalize the arrangement, construction of which had technically started last summer.

“They’re excited,” Williston Mayor Charles Goodman tells local ABC affiliate WCJB. “People are just chomping at the bit, ready for it. I deal with phone calls every day. ‘When is it ready? When is it going to be here? They’re putting it in front of my house, can I hook it up now?’, you know these kinds of things.”

“What I tell them is we’re just building the project,” he added. “It’s still under construction. We’re hoping to have everything done by the end of the year.”

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Goodman has publicly expressed concern about the cost of the project, but local supporters, and all of the city council members, say the network is a necessary remedy to the lack of affordable, fast, and reliable broadband access, increasingly essential for online educational, health, employment, and other opportunities.

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.

In the last two months of the Biden administration, nearly $500 million in grants were announced to support Tribal broadband projects. From Alaska to Virginia, 55 Tribal nations were poised to improve Internet access and advance digital sovereignty in their communities.

As President Trump took office, more than a hundred applicants still awaited word on their proposals, with nearly $500 million still available in the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP).

Then, silence. Ten months of silence.

In early November, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) sent a letter to NTIA officials asking about the TBCP. The program was established with two appropriations totaling nearly $3 billion. The first round of TBCP grants rolled out throughout 2022 and 2023, totalling nearly $100 million in use and adoption funding and over $1.7 billion in planning or infrastructure funding.

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The $500 million announced at the end of the Biden administration was part of round two of the program, for which applications were due in March 2024. With about $1 billion available, only about half of the funding in round two had been allocated.

What was happening, the Senators asked, with the rest of that funding? There were other questions too.

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.

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.

Antelope Valley, California officials are hoping to leverage California’s historic recent round of broadband grant programs to deliver affordable fiber access to a significant swath of long-underserved southern California desert communities.

According to Antelope Valley officials, they’ve applied for a $24.3 million California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Broadband Infrastructure grant to help them deliver symmetrical 10 Gigabit Passive Optical Network (XGS-PON) technology to 988 total households, most of which would be seeing affordable fiber access for the first time ever.

A breakdown of the project included in the application submitted by the Antelope Valley Union High School District to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), indicates that the proposed project seeks to connect to the California State Middle Mile route at two points currently being negotiated in collaboration with state Middle Mile Authorities.

“The award will not be determined until approximately quarter two of next year,” Antelope Valley Union High School District Superintendent Greg Nehen tells ILSR.

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The Antelope Valley Broadband Project would be constructed with 100 percent underground fiber installation, with all fiber-optic cables placed in buried conduit within public rights-of-way, using underground microducts, handholes, and splice enclosures. No aerial deployment is planned for this project, according to project leaders.

Fort Collins, Colorado’s popular Connexion municipal broadband network has unveiled SmartHome, a new network management app that can help the ISPs customers better manage the security and bandwidth-consumption of their home networks.

SmartHome lets users see every connected device, set parental controls, prioritize bandwidth for work or entertainment, and guard against online threats through integrated security services like ExperienceIQ and ProtectIQ. The expanded new functionality is being bundled with the ISPs Enhanced 2-Gig and Premier 10-Gig plans.

Connexion currently offers locals three tiers of fiber service: a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) option for $70 a month; a symmetrical 2 Gbps option for $100 a month; and a symmetrical 10 Gbps offering for $200 per month.

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Fort Collins, Colorado has repeatedly won awards for being a trailblazer in the municipal fiber space, and local subscribers continue to take notice. The city-owned and operated Connexion network operation just announced it has passed the 20,000 subscriber mark, after nabbing a significant new wave of state and federal funding for expansion early last year.

Fort Collins began thinking about a citywide fiber deployment as early as 2012. By 2015, locals had voted to exempt the city from a counterproductive state law restricting communities from building their own broadband networks.