Good news from Montana! Bozeman Fiber has secured funding to begin construction of a 23-mile open access community fiber network. Through an impressive partnership among eight local banks, Bozeman Fiber secured $3.85 million.  

First Interstate Bank, Rocky Mountain Bank, Big Sky Western Bank, Opportunity Bank, U.S. Bank, American Bank, First Montana Bank and Bank of Bozeman all came together to support the fledgling network. During a press conference, First Interstate Bank President Bruce Parker described how this level of collaboration was possible. He initially approached twelve banks in April about the project. Now, six months later, eight banks have committed to providing funds. Parker expressed a high level of confidence for the network’s impact:

The project really speaks for itself in terms of what this infrastructure will do for the Bozeman community. 

Bozeman Fiber is itself a remarkable collaboration between public and private sector interests. The city of Bozeman will not manage the network themselves. Instead, the City Commission voted to form a separate nonprofit entity to direct the project. In order to consider the many diverse needs of Bozeman from the economic to the educational, the board of this newly formed nonprofit features seven members from the public and private sector. The end result is this unique public-private partnership. 

A purpose for the fiber network is economic development, in part by providing affordable fiber access to small businesses and startups. The press conference took place at the headquarters of Elixiter, an online marketing company that has grown rapidly in the past four years. The founder, Andrew Hall explained how Bozeman Fiber will benefit companies like Elixiter:

The Old Town-Orono Fiber Corporation (OTO Fiber), the entity created by the cities of Old Town and Orono in Maine to design, install, maintain and manage a planned fiber network, recently received a grant for $250,000.

The funds, awarded by the Northern Border Regional Commission (NBRC), will help the communities commence their open access network project. According to a statement released by Maine Senators Angus King and Susan Collins, this was one of six awards to Maine communities. The other grants included road, sewer, and other municipally-owned facilities needed to maintain or grow jobs in the northern counties of Maine.

Congress created NBRC in 2008 as a state-federal partnership to encourage job growth in several northern counties of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York that experience economic distress. 

In 2014, Old Town and Orono, working with the University of Maine, had been awarded ConnectME funds for the project but the funding was blocked by Time Warner Cable. Those funds were meant to string approximately 4 miles of cable intended for integration into a much larger network to eventually connect to the state's Three Ring Binder network. The ConnectME Authority chose to withhold the funds, based on TWC's argument that this open access network would overbuild potentially 320 subscribers but OTO Fiber vowed to continue and seek funds elsewhere. The funding blocked by TWC amounted to $125,000.

Approximately 7,800 people live in Old Town; Orono is home to a little over 10,000 people and the Unversity of Maine where over 11,000 students attend classes.

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) recently named the public private partnership (P3) between the City of Westminster, MD and Ting Inc. as 2015’s “Community Broadband Innovative Partnership of the Year.”  NATOA will officially honor the partnership at their Community Broadband Awards ceremony in San Diego this week.  

In a press release NATOA praised the P3 “...for showcasing an entirely new approach in public private partnerships to reach the common goal of bringing next generation fiber broadband to communities while demonstrating the possibility of creative solutions.”  In Ting’s own press release announcing the award, they described their unique arrangement as private partners in Westminster’s initiative aimed at providing their rural community of more than 18,000 people with blazing fast fiber internet service:

“We have agreed to an open access model. For a period of time at launch, Ting will be both the exclusive network operator and the exclusive service provider. After that, while we will maintain the exclusive role of network operator, we will open up the network to competitive service providers. That gives Westminster the dual benefits of stability and competition. They know that the network will be managed competently by one closely managed relationship. They also know that their businesses and residents will benefit from having many providers competing to offer them the best service at the best price.”

In Rio Blanco County, you’re almost more likely to find a dinosaur fossil than a human being. This rural county in northwestern Colorado has about two people for every square mile, but its sparse population is not stopping it from advancing an ambitious open-access broadband initiative. 

More than a year into the rollout of the network plan, Rio Blanco County (RBC) has already succeeded in soliciting $2 million in matched funds from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), contracted a network operator, and secured easements (land-use rights) from the county’s two largest municipalities to begin construction on the FTTx network. The bulk of the funding will come for the County budgeting for the infrastructure.

The network will initially touch every block and ultimately be expanded to deliver a fiber connection to each premise in the two towns. 

Rio Blanco’s network will be a four-tier open access arrangement. The county will own the infrastructure - from the data center to the optical network terminal (ONT) within the home and everything in between. A private company, Colorado.Fiber.Community, will operate the network. And a combination of independent middle-mile Internet service providers and last-mile value-added resalers will offer services directly to residents. 

For Rio Blanco County IT Director, Blake Mobley, this arrangement is what makes Rio Blanco County’s initiative both unique and feasible. Mobley gave a presentation at the MountainConnect conference in Vail, Colorado, where he spoke about the challenges and the early successes of Rio Blanco County community broadband network. Because the network is open-access, he said, the county can focus on what it does best - laying the groundwork and setting larger policy objectives, not taking the mantle of Internet service provider: 

We look at this just like a county building county roads. You build those roads out. You as a county aren’t anticipating a large return on that investment from those roads up front. It’s the utilization of those roads that builds an economy that’s going to be to your benefit.

The Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD) is turning to residents to plot the course for expansion, reports the Central Kitsap Reporter. In order to find out where the greatest interest lies in municipal fiber connectivity, KPUD will be using the COS Service Zones survey system.

“Since this is a public network, we do not feel comfortable relying on anecdotal data to determine the next phase for broadband expansion,” said Bob Hunter, Kitsap PUD General Manager. “What’s most appealing with the COS Service Zones is that it enables us to let the gathering and push come from the citizens. We want to be sure the residents are driving this.”

We have reported on the KPUD, mostly as it related to other stories. The publicly owned open access fiber network in Kitsap County Washington began providing wholesale only service in 2000. The goal was to provide better connectivity to public facilities and improve emergency communications and the KPUD has reached that goal.

Readers will remember Seth, who almost had to sell his Internet-less dream home due to mapping errors and the general failures at Comcast. When he approached the KPUD, they found a way to bring him an Internet connection. An increasing number of residents have asked the agency to find a way to serve their homes. Currently, PUDs in Washington are prohibited by state law from offering retail service, which can limit financially-viable investments, but Kitsap is trying to get a sense of the size of the interest.

The COS Service Zones system will help KPUD plan for any potential buildout by determining where customers are most likely to subscribe. The system will also allow the public to see where the KPUD plans to expand as a result of the survey.

Kitsap County residents can go to the website kpud.servicezones.net to fill out the online survey.

We have covered the small Idaho city of Ammon before, but the people there always seem to be innovating. A few weeks ago, the city took first place with an ultra-high speed app in a National Institute of Justice competition. That utlra-high speed came from the city’s fiber network built for municipal buildings several years ago. The network has since expanded to connect the schools and some businesses.

Now, residents of Ammon might also get to experience high speed Internet. The city is conducting a survey, called Get Fiber Now, to determine interest in building a unique open access network. The first area with a 70% take rate will have 300 homes added to the network.

Ammon's technology director Bruce Patterson has a plan to make this unlike any other open access networks in the world. The fiber will be partitioned to have multiple services (such as telephone and television) on one strand. Our Christopher Mitchell has called the idea "open access on steroids” and the "best shot at demonstrating what can be done as far as innovation on an open network.” Patterson now has a pilot project of about seven homes connected to the experimental network with symmetrical speed of 1Gbps.

The city intends to have the plans for the open access FTTH network finalized for this next spring and is looking at a 20- to 30- year bond to cover the costs.

Local news coverage has the rest:

Santa Cruz, California, and its 62,000 people with poor Internet connectivity near Silicon Valley, could be one of the larger municipalities to develop a citywide fiber network. The Santa Cruz Fiber project, which was announced on June 24, 2015, would be an open-access public private partnership (PPP) with the city constructing the network and a private company, Cruzio, serving as network operator. The plans are preliminary, but the announcement highlighted the project’s emphasis on local ownership: 

“A locally-owned, next-generation broadband network operated openly and independently and built for Santa Cruz, [the Santa Cruz Fiber Project] is uniquely tailored to fit the diverse needs of the Santa Cruz community.” 

Cruzio is one of the oldest and largest Internet service providers in California. Completely locally-owned and staffed, Cruzio is rooted in Santa Cruz County. The company’s name perfectly describes it. Cruz- from Santa Cruz and -io from I/O (Input/Output, communication between an information processing system and the rest of the world).  Our Christopher Mitchell is gushing over the name and says: “I seriously love it.”

Fiber is not a new commodity in Santa Cruz. Since 2011, Cruzio has installed fiber in several of its projects, and the fiber has wooed some 30 entrepreneurs and solo practitioners to stay in the downtown area at the Cruzio Works, a co-working space. Last November, Central Coast Broadband Consortium commissioned a study of the fiber networks in Santa Cruz (paid for with a grant from the California Public Utilities commission). They discovered more fiber under the city of Santa Cruz than in any other city in the counties of Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito. Unfortunately much of it belonged to incumbent providers like Comcast and AT&T who are loath to lease dark fiber or make affordable fiber connections available to local businesses and residents.