Residents and businesses in the rural Massachusetts Town of Greenfield are in the process of gaining faster and more affordable Internet service thanks a new municipally-owned hybrid fiber-wireless network. In November, more than 80% of voters passed a ballot referendum to authorize the city to create a nonprofit entity to construct and operate the network.

While scheduled completion is not until spring 2017, some customers will be able to start service during the network’s construction period starting in July. Thanks to the Greenlight pilot program, customers and network operators are already experiencing the new service. Upon completion of an engineering study to iron out the precise plans for the network, the city will start construction of the 80- to 100- mile fiber network. There will be as many as 1,000 wireless access points.

How Does it All Work?

Residents and businesses seeking the fastest available connection to the network will install an antenna on their property. Although prices for the antenna-based service have not yet been determined, the likely base charge for a symmetrical 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) connection will be $29.99 per month. The city expects to offer speeds as fast as 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). The network will provide Internet, telephone service, and possibly video.

Customers seeking basic Internet access will be able to connect directly to the access points from their personal wireless devices for as little as $9.95 per month. A consultant for the project said that low income residents in the city may be able to get almost free access to this lowest tier plan after reimbursement through Lifeline, an FCC program that provides a subsidy to all low income Internet users.

The town is providing an upfront loan from the general fund of $5 million to pay for the network. Prices for access to the network may decrease as new customers sign up and revenues grow. Eventual profits from the network could also go back into the town’s general fund to spend down the initial loan.

Ozarks Electric Cooperative has a plan to bring fast, affordable, reliable connectivity to northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma.

Fast, Affordable, Reliable Connectivity At Last

OzarksGo, a wholly owned subsidiary of the electric co-op, will provide Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Internet service with symmetrical speeds of up to a Gigabit (1,000 Megabits) per second. The fiber network will cost $150 million to build over the next six years.

ArkansasOnline and local news station KSFM reported on the future network. The residential FTTH service will have no data caps and OzarksGo will offer additional services, such as telephone and video. At the end of the project, all co-op members will have access to the network's services.

According to the FCC 2016 Broadband report, 25 percent of all Arkansas residents don't have access to broadband (defined as 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload). In Oklahoma, the FCC puts the numbers higher at 27 percent. Rural areas are even higher with 48 percent lacking in Arkansas and 66 percent missing out in Oklahoma. Considering the data collection process depends on self-reporting by ISPs, those numbers are considered low. The number of households that do not have access to federally defined broadband, especially in rural areas, is higher.

Soon though, these Arkansas and Oklahoma residents will have access to fast, affordable Internet access. General manager for OzarksGo Randy Klindt, who previously worked on Co-Mo Electric Cooperative's FTTH network, explained in the video below that the price for a Gigabit will be less than $100, which is an entirely opt-in service.

It's been well over a year since awards were announced in the FCC Rural Broadband Experiment program, but several projects have not started because funds have not been released. The recipients are ready to commence, but the FCC's own requirements have halted expansion of high-quality Internet access to areas that need it the most.

The Rural Broadband Experiments program has required Letters of Credit from the top 100 banks. Although it may have seemed like good regulation, it completely ignores the reality of small businesses.

They Are Experiments

The FCC touted the Rural Broadband Experiments as the answer for small, local, and nontraditional, Internet Service Providers (ISP). The program had $100 million in funding to encourage innovation in ill-served rural areas. After the FCC provisionally approved 37 of the 200 applications, those providers then needed to secure Letters of Credit to ensure that the projects were secure, reliable investments.

The Letters of Credit for this program must be from one of the top 100 banks, and big banks are not known for lending to small ISPs. Local banks, however, do lend to such projects because they are familiar with the local ISP, the local economy, and the community. These big banks that the FCC wants, however, cannot judge the relative soundness of such projects, especially not “experiments.”

Big Banks Don’t Understand Risk

Why would you require a Letter of Credit from these banks? Last year, ILSR published a chart that shows how banks with more than $100 billion in assets “make poorer lending decisions and write-off more bad loans than do community banks, those financial institutions with under $1 billion in assets.”

This month, Spencer Municipal Utilities (SMU) will continue to expand the town’s fiber network. The steady incremental build will bring better Internet access to residents, business, and municipal facilities in the northwest Iowa town.

Incremental Approach

The Spencer Daily Reporter wrote about how SMU is connecting more residents with Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) one step at a time. The municipal utility broke the project into four phases.

Phases I and II included 2,700 homes and businesses. Phase III, which begins this month, will impact more than 1,100 homes and businesses. Phase IV will finish extending FTTH service to the rest of the city.

The project will replace the existing telecommunications infrastructure installed in the late 1990s. Curtis Dean of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities described the network's history in our Community Broadband Bits podcast from 2012.

Evolving Needs, Changing Technology

Spencer Municipal Utilities marketing and community relations manager, Amanda Gloyd, said to the Spencer Daily Reporter:

"Just like internet service has evolved from dial up to digital service lines and cable modem, fiber will give customers the next level of service to continue to improve the way they live, work, and play and we are continuing to build out this service throughout the community of Spencer."

Spencer, like many other small towns, chose to invest in Internet network infrastructure so residents and businesses in this rural area could get fast, affordable, reliable services. Subscribers appreciate the excellent customer service that comes with their local, publicly owned network.

Before We Leave

The East Central Vermont Community Fiber-Optic Network (ECFiber), a 235-mile Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network that currently connects over 1,200 customers across 24 small towns in east central Vermont, is doing well. It’s doing so well, in fact, that a capital investment group will commit $9 million in long-term financing to the network, a loan that will allow ECFiber to expand and spend down some of its existing debt. 

ECFiber announced last month, that it will use about half of the funds to activate 110 miles of existing fiber this year and add 250 more miles of fiber in 2017 bringing the network to approximately 600 miles. Network officials will use the remaining funds to pay down $7 million in debt; the move will allow ECFiber to save money through reduced interest rates and spread out loan payments over a longer period of time.

Stability Begets New Financing, New Possibilities

The news of this new injection of debt financing comes several years after the original plan to build a larger 1,900-mile, $90 million FTTH network ultimately didn’t materialize in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. When ECFiber failed to secure debt financing for that larger plan, the network scaled back its ambitions, turning to direct investments and raising $7 million from 479 local investors to construct the current network.

This self-financing strategy (for more, listen to our Chris interview Carole Monroe, former General Manager in Community Broadband Bits podcast #177) made ECFiber a reality. This new financing will allow the network to expand at a faster pace and allows ECFiber to significantly stretch its footprint. In the past, the crowd funding approach allowed for targeted, smaller expansions.

Fairlawn, Ohio, a quaint little city in Northern Ohio, it is about to get a big Gig – lightning fast Internet speeds of up to one Gigabit (1000 Megabits) per second (Gbps) – for $75 a month. The city has considered the prospect of such a network since last year, and now the community is moving forward.

On April 4th, Fairlawn City Council unanimously approved several ordinances to build a Fiber-to-the-Home network (FTTH) called “FairlawnGig.” For financing, the network will use revenue bonds in an agreement with the Development Finance Authority of Summit County.

A New FTTH Muni

In November 2015, Fairlawn hired a consultant and envisioned a public-private partnership for the FTTH plan of FairlawnGig. Now, however, these ordinances ensure that the $10 million network that will begin construction in May 2016 will in fact be a municipal network. The ordinances enable the city to enter into a contract with a firm to design and construct the network in the way that best meets the community’s needs.

Currently, the prices are established as:

• Residential 1 Gbps – $75
• Residential 100 Mbps - $55
• Residential 30 Mbps - $30

All speeds will be symmetrical, so upload and download speeds are equally fast. The network will also offer phone service for an extra $25 a month. Businesses have similar speeds for prices between $90 and $500.

FairlawnGig will serve not only the 7,500 residents of Fairlawn, but it will also provide connectivity to the Akron-Fairlawn-Bath Joint Economic Development District. Ohio communities use these sort of districts to share infrastructure improvement projects.

From Vision to Reality

After thanking the City Council for passing the ordinances that have enabled the FTTH project, Fairlawn Mayor William J. Roth, Jr. further reiterated the purpose of the network: