In a bimonthly local show, Burlington City Councilmember Karen Paul discusses City issues. In the recent show, she discussed Burlington Telecom with Gary Evans, the head of Hiawatha Broadband Communications (HBC). Evans has been helping BT get back on its feet after struggling for years. HBC is a private company most notable for strong success in overbuilding cable companies in SE Minnesota as well as running the Monticello FiberNet for the City.
For those who need an update on what is happening to BT since its problems were widely publicized, this is a great place to start.
As the municipal broadband movement continues to gain momentum, here is a new fact sheet that highlights the dramatic surge in the building of publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure. We also unveil a new map of municipal broadband networks across U.S.
A new documentary tells the uplifting story of how Vermonters rallied around the emergence of Communications Union Districts (CUDs) as the state's primary vehicle to bring high-quality Internet service to every resident and business in one of the most rural states in the nation.
In January, we released our new census of municipal networks in the United States for 2024, and the significant growth that we've seen over the last two years as more and more cities commit to building Internet infrastructure to add new tools for their local government, incentivize new economic development, and improve connectivity for households. The trend has not gone unnoticed by the monopoly players and their allies, and a new short documentary by Light Reading does a great job of outlining the stakes for local governments, residents stuck on poor connections, and the incumbents as the wave of municipal networks grows.
Shining a light on bond-backed municipal broadband projects is the recent announcement that ECFiber, Vermont's first Communications Union District (CUD), obtained a BB rating from Standard & Poor Global, the nation’s preeminent credit rating agency. In what ECFiber officials describe as "a historic moment,” the bond rating will allow ECFiber to pay lower borrowing costs to complete a network expansion project now underway.
NEK Broadband continues to bring affordable fiber access to the long-neglected corners of the Green Mountain State. According to the latest update by NEK Broadband, a recently completed rollout has delivered affordable fiber access to 700 new addresses across multiple rural Vermont communities. With this latest expansion, NEK Broadband now provides fiber access to 2,100 predominantly rural Vermont residents in total, many of which only received broadband for the first time last year.
As the new year begins, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) announced today its latest tally of municipal broadband networks which shows a dramatic surge in the number of communities building publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure over the last three years. Since January 1, 2021, at least 47 new municipal networks have come online with dozens of other projects still in the planning or pre-construction phase, which includes the possibility of building 40 new municipal networks in California alone.