After years of neglect by regional broadband giants, five years ago the town of Arrowsic, Maine decided to build their own broadband network on the back of federal grants and loans.
Now regional broadband provider Fidium has targeted the small town of 477 with broadband expansion, after previously rejecting calls for better, more affordable service.
Critics say Fidium’s goal isn’t honest competition, but a bid to try to put the popular local municipal broadband network on shaky financial ground.
We first wrote about Arrowsic back in February of 2020, shortly after Governor Janet Mills announced that the town would be building its own fiber network after decades of frustration with spotty, expensive, or nonexistent service from large telecom giants like Consolidated Communications, which recently fully rebranded as Fidium.
The project was a partnership between a new Arrowsic Broadband Authority (ABA) and Axiom Technologies, heavily driven by a combined $1.2 million in grant and loan funding from the USDA's ReConnect Pilot Program. The goal: connect 237 households, 20 businesses, and four farms with symmetrical fiber optic service of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).
The town’s fiber network went live in March of 2024, some nine years after locals began first seriously considering the idea. Now, Arrowsic locals have the option of three primary tiers of service: symmetrical 100 Mbps for $50 a month; symmetrical 250 Mbps for $80 a month; and symmetrical 500 Mbps for $110 a month.
The town FAQ indicates that Arrowsic also offers low income residents access to a 50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up broadband tier for $30 or less. The network has been broadly popular, with 200 of the town’s 235 business and residential locations signing up for service.
Here Comes A Transparent Effort To Undermine Progress
Last fall Fidium, which had again completely ignored calls from the town for better service for years, began sending mailers out to locals, promising them broadband at speeds below what the town was offering. It’s not actually clear Fidium is doing any major new investment in the town, or simply offering temporarily reduced rates for existing, slow DSL connections.
“Residents shouldn’t be fooled by this attempt to undercut the town’s network,” Gigi Sohn, Executive Director of the American Association of Public Broadband, wrote of the effort. “While it’s hard to argue with competition and lower prices, this isn’t an honest attempt to compete, it’s an anticompetitive ploy to put the community network out of business.”
Officials were hopeful that the network and the Arrowsic Broadband Authority would become profitable and start paying back into the town’s budget sometime in 2029, after they’d socked away a few hundred thousand for future maintenance of the network. Fidium’s sudden targeting of the town could put that timeline at risk.
“We are a very small network,” Vince Capone, an ABA commissioner, recently told the Bangor Daily News. “We are literally on the edge of maintaining that network because we have such a small customer base.”
Capone said that losing even 20 percent of its customer base would be a “critical problem” in the project’s plan.
The town’s direct financial risk is limited, given it has no direct debt involved in the build. But an erosion of the timeline caused by Fidium could result in the municipality being forced to pull from the town’s savings or borrow money to keep the network operational. Fidium of course knows this, resulting in its sudden, uncharacteristic interest in the small town.
“It came as some surprise when all of a sudden we started seeing, essentially, a duplicated system being built on top of ours,” Don Hudson, another ABA Commissioner told the Daily News. “If it wasn’t actually happening, it would be laughable.”
The town is making the rounds, reminding locals that the money they pay into the town’s fiber network gets redirected back into the town, instead of being extracted by out of towners (Fidium’’s headquarters is in Mattoon, Illinois).
Arrowsic’s biggest advantage, Sohn notes, is that the network was built by the community for the community. Historically, data has repeatedly shown that municipal broadband offers faster, cheaper access with better customer service and more transparent pricing. As members of the local communities, such network operators are also more accountable to locals.
“That means not only fast speeds at affordable prices, but customer service that puts the residents first, and the promise that by 2029, the local broadband authority will pay the town $50,000 annually,” she said. “Given those advantages, Consolidated will have to do a lot more than cut their prices for a year to make any real inroads in Arrowsic.”
Arrowsic’s success requires properly informing locals about the value of community broadband, something that can be challenging in a state where entrenched monopolies have at times created fake consumer groups to mislead locals with disinformation.
Maine is currently ranked 40th in the U.S. in terms of resident access to gigabit-capable broadband service. Like so much of the country, the state is heavily dominated by regional monopolies that failed to uniformly deliver affordable, next-generation broadband, despite decades of federal subsidies, regulatory favors, and tax breaks.
Community broadband, when done well, is a dagger in the heart of that sort of broken status quo. And once locals are connected, it doesn’t take them long to recognize the net benefit.
“People who live in Arrowsic have a great fondness for Arrowsic,” Hudson said of his neighbors. “And they really love this network that we built.”
Header image of Doubling Point Lighthouse in Arrowsic, Maine courtesy of cmh2315fl on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic
Inline map of Arrowsic Google maps screenshot
