Sandpoint, Idaho, located in the state’s panhandle, is likely to host Ting’s Internet service over publicly owned Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) infrastructure. All that remains is for the service provider to determine that the demand exists in the anticipated service area of approximately 9,700 people. In addition to residents and businesses in Sandpoint, properties in nearby Dover, Ponderay, and Kootenai are anticipated potential subscribers.

Sandpoint, Idaho

Approximately 7,500 people live in the city, which is the Bonner County Seat. The community is popular as a ski resort town and is located on Lake Pend Oreille. In addition to tourism, the manufacturing, aerospace, software, and healthcare industries are important employers in Sandpoint. It covers approximately 4.8 square miles and, five years ago, was named “most Beautiful Small Town” by Rand McNally and USA Today.

Seeking Assistance Moving Forward

The city has recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to find a firm to propose a plan to make the best use of their existing dark fiber network. According to the RFP, Sandpoint is looking for consultants to help them engage in conversations with stakeholders and providers, determine the city’s assets, use their assets for maximum economic development, and a variety of other tasks.

Sandpoint has had an existing conduit system in place for some time but, according to the RFP, has not been “proofed” and may not be suitable for larger cables. The city also has an underground fiber backbone and is in the process of installing more fiber-optic cable.

Bonner County also owns conduit within Sandpoint that can be accessed as part of the town’s project. The RFP describes more conduit in and around the city and Sandpoint’s preliminary plans to use it to improve local connectivity.

Important dates:

Tribal governments face unique problems when connecting their communities, but the need is great. 

In this episode of Community Connections, Christopher Mitchell speaks with Matt Rantanen, Director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association (SCTCA) and Director of the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) Initiative. Mitchell and Rantanen talk about the special challenges of deploying fiber on tribal lands.

“Business in the 21st century is driven by broadband.”

Those are the words of Gordon Petrie, the Mayor of the small west central City of Emmett, Idaho that is in the process of constructing its own fiber network. The Mayor and other city leaders have high hopes that the network will create economic opportunities in their city within this sparsely populated part of the country:

“Idaho is one of the least connected states in the union." Petrie said. “We intend to change that by making Emmett one of the most connected communities in Idaho. We’ll have the infrastructure to support high-tech business.”

The Buildout and Beyond

When completed, the new network will encircle the city and connect Emmett’s City Hall, its Public Safety Building, Emmett City Park (which is already providing free Wi-Fi), Public works facilities, the fire department, and the library. The city’s systems administrator said the city is timing construction of the fiber to coincide with other scheduled utility digs. Beyond these immediate plans, the city also has a five year strategy for the network that includes a goal of connecting all of the city’s businesses and its 6,500 residents to the fiber network. 

Emmett’s buildout process is similar to the strategy used in nearby Ammon, another small Idaho city that several years ago began constructing a fiber network starting with its municipal facilities. As with Emmett's proposed plan, Ammon constructed its network incrementally over a period of several years, eventually reaching the city’s business community and just now starting to connect to residents as well. 

Ammon’s example shows that when a city like Emmett takes the initiative to bring locally owned fiber infrastructure to the community, good things are likely to follow. In the coming years, Emmett can expect to see public savings, economic development, and opportunities that may enable them to connect the entire community with fast, affordable, reliable Internet infrastructure.

Highlands is a small community of less than 1,000 residents located in the Nantahala National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains. Along the western tip of the state, Highlands faces the same problem as many other rural communities - poor connectivity. In order to bring high-quality Internet access to residents and businesses, Highlands has implemented a plan to deploy city-owned Internet network infrastructure.

A Connected Escape Up In The Mountains

Highland entertains a large number of summer tourists who flock to its high altitude to escape summer heat and humidity. Summer visitors can fill the city’s six square miles and surrounding area with up to 20,000 people. The city operates a municipal electric utility along with water, sewer, and garbage pick up. 

To round off the list of offered services and bring better connectivity to the community, Highlands created the Altitude Community Broadband. In January, the Town Board authorized to borrow $40,000 from its General Fund and $210,000 from its Electric Enterprise Fund to deploy and launch the new service. The loan will be repaid with revenue from the new service.

The town has long-term plans to offer both Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) and fixed wireless service to residents and businesses in the downtown area. Fiber is already available in limited areas within Highlands proper; pricing is available on a case-by-case basis. The landscape is rugged, so residents outside of the city may not be able to transition to FTTH, reported a December HighlandsInfo Newspaper, but the fixed wireless access is still an affordable and workable option in a place considered a poor investment by large providers.

Residential options for Altitude Wireless Internet Access are:

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.”