Valparaiso, Indiana, is investing in dark fiber to stimulate economic development; it is deploying ValpoNet, a dark fiber network to serve local businesses and institutions.

The city of approximately 32,000 people is a little over an hour southeast of Chicago and home to Valparaiso University, Purdue University North Central, Indiana Vocational Technical College, and several other colleges. The community also has a large manufacturing base and a number of hospitals and medical clinics, so there is an ample supply of entities with IT departments with the requisite knowledge to use a dark fiber network.

If At First You Don't Find Fiber...

In 2010, a regional economic development organization developed a report that identified the lack of fiber in "Valpo" and Porter County but no project developed. The city moved on to other things until 2014. A situation with a large financial information company in town breathed new life into the idea of municipally owned fiber. The company wanted to expand its facility and wanted to be sure it could access better connectivity. Several years earlier, there had been an ice storm at one of the company's home offices and, while they thought they had redundancy from the incumbents, such was not the case. They lost connectivity for days and from that point on, whenever they opened new offices, expanded, or relocated, redundancy was always a top priority. 

Valpo's Redevelopment Commission decided to hire a consultant to draft a feasibility study. He determined that a dark fiber network was not only possible, but needed. The study revealed that other companies suffered from poor reliability and considered affordability another pressing issue. 

The Commission, working with Economic Development Director Patrick Lyp, reached out to entities in Valpo and found that the university and healthcare facilities were also interested in the promise of better reliability via fiber-optic connections. Valparaiso University and two large regional hospitals, including St. Mary's, expressed their desire to participate. Local officials approached large companies directly and, while several indicated that contracts with incumbents must be fulfilled before making a...

The Southern Tier Network (STN), a community-owned dark fiber network that spans multiple counties in upstate New York, enables fast, affordable, reliable Internet access in New York’s Southern Tier region. Locally based private Internet service provider Empire Access offers services via the network as it continues to expand.

The Corning Leader reports that Empire Access intends to offer residential Internet access over the STN in the Cities of Corning and Elmira sometime in the next year. 

Empire Access

Empire Access, which offers current customers Internet access, voice, and 200-plus Digital TV channels, is waiting to launch services in Corning and Elmira until after they gain approval from the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to provide digital TV services in these communities. Although the company could begin offering fiber and phone services at any time, the company wants to be able to offer the full bundle of options before they officially launch in Coring and Elmira.

As Stop the Cap! wrote in a June 2015 article about the STN, the business strategy at Empire Access is focused on bringing Internet access to areas of the state where Verizon refuses to go and where Time Warner Cable’s service tops out at 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 5 Mbps upload. For current residential customers, Empire Access offers bundled services about $30 per month on average less than competitors.

In addition Corning and Elmira, Empire Service now provides triple play services via the STN Network to the City of Hornell, the Town of Bath, and the Village of Watkins Glen.

Economic Benefits of the STN

As the Corning Leader notes in their article, some businesses in Elmira and Corning are already getting fiber connectivity via Empire Access and the Southern Tier Network. But when we last wrote about the STN in December of 2015, we quoted Elmira-based business owner Mike Mitchell, who had expressed frustration about the lack of fast and affordable Internet services for Elmira...

The publicly owned fiber optic network of Dakota County, Minnesota, and of cities within its borders may soon come under the oversight of a local joint powers board.

David Asp, County Collaboration Engineer, said the County started putting the network together in May of 1998. It has grown from 20 miles in 2005 to 112 miles in 2015, and then to 270 miles in 2016. The network provides speeds of up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) download. This news marks a coming of age for the County’s 10-year-old Internet network which, together with the cities' related infrastructure, now spans 270 miles. The County network serves hundreds of public facilities and operations including county buildings, city halls, libraries, schools and more than 350 traffic control signals.

The County and 11 cities within its jurisdiction are now reviewing whether to approve a limited joint powers agreement that would have them inventory their fiber optic infrastructure to find out "what do we have and what are gaps in the system," said Matt Smith, Dakota County deputy manager. Their second objective is to develop a detailed financing system to operate an integrated Internet network, he said.

Asp said he expects the County and the cities will decide by April whether to take this first step in forming the joint powers alliance.

After these studies, the County and cities are then expected to decide if they want to participate in a broader joint powers agreement that would establish the Dakota Broadband Board. If the answer is "Yes," the joint powers board could begin operations in early 2017, Asp said.

Duties of the Board could include establishing policies, procedures, and pricing on leasing the network’s dark fiber, Asp said. Dark fiber is fiber-optic cable that is laid underground but currently not in use, and thus is dormant, or “dark.”

Dakota County, Dakota County Development Agency, Apple Valley, Burnsville, Eagan, Farmington, Hastings, Inver Grove Heights, Lakeville, Mendota Heights, Rosemount, South St. Paul and West St. Paul are reviewing the initial JPA.

Promoting Economic Development

Asp recently told us that one major role of a joint powers board would be figuring out how to use the dark fiber (unused strands) from Dakota County’s Internet network to promote economic development. That could include extending the network to...

Last week, we were excited at the announcement from Huntsville Utilities in Alabama. Huntsville is building a municipal dark fiber network to every premise in its territory that will be open to multiple service providers. Google has already committed to using it to bring real connectivity to the community.

In this week's episode, 191, we are talking with Tom Reiman and Stacy Cantrell to understand the model. Tom is President of The Broadband Group, the consultant that is working with Huntsville on this project. Stacy Cantrell is the Vice President of Engineering for Huntsville Utilities.

We talk about how the model originated, some of the technical details behind the network, and what benefits they expect to see. This is an excellent discussion with many implications for the thousands of communities that want to improve Internet access locally but would prefer not to offer services directly.

The transcript from this episode is available here.

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Thanks to Kathleen Martin for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Player vs. Player."