Bergen County, New Jersey officials say they’re making significant progress on their plan to dramatically expand Bergen County Fiber – the county’s new municipal fiber Institutional Network (I-Net) – with recently completed deployments in communities like Little Ferry and Lodi.

The I-Net doesn’t provide broadband access directly to local residents, instead focusing exclusively on providing alternative fiber connectivity for communities, municipalities, and key anchor institutions. As a result county leaders say participating local municipalities are already seeing dramatic discounts - with some halving their monthly costs already - over regional location enterprise-scale fiber providers.

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Plans for the Bergen County Fiber were announced in February of 2024 after a two-year collaborative effort between the county’s IT department and Millenium Communications Group, which began the project by installing fiber to most key anchor institutions including municipal buildings, schools, and regional libraries.

From there, the county has steadily expanded access to fiber that’s significantly cheaper than anything provided by regional telecom monopolies Verizon (FiOS) and Optimum, recently culminating with launches in municipalities starting with Little Ferry (population 11,000), and expanding to Hillsdale (population 10,266 ), and Lodi (population 26,000).

By any measure, 2025 was a tough year in the grand project to extend fast, affordable, reliable broadband access to every home in the United States. The Digital Equity Act was abruptly cancelled, BEAD was restructured, small- and large-scale outages were common, and prices from the monopolies rose yet again.

But good things happened, too. In 2025, we saw seven new municipal broadband networks across the country that were lit up for service. As is usual, it was a mixture of partnerships, business models, and construction approaches to meet the unique challenges of a patchwork broadband landscape.

A Bountiful 2025 for Municipal Broadband

In California, the Gateway Cities Fiber Optic Network launched (eventually covering 23 cities); it will eventually cover 72 community anchor institutions and almost 5,000 unserved locations across member cities with the help of state grants.