Broadband Communities

Located in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, Dos Palos (CA) is halfway between San Jose and Fresno. It’s a remote community, which created challenges for the Dos Palos-Oro Loma Joint Unified School District (DPOL) when it needed to implement distance learning plans during the pandemic. Paoze Lee, the district’s technology systems director, said it was obvious that the district could provide wireless and broadband coverage only to about 50 percent of its students via commercial wireless operators. “As we tried to bridge the digital divide, we wanted to fill in the gaps,” Lee says.

Sterling, a town of about 8,000 in Worcester County (MA), has become another example of a community controlling its broadband destiny. The Sterling Municipal Light Department (SMLD) is building the Local Area Municipal Broadband (LAMB) network, which will bring fiber-based internet to Sterling’s residents and businesses. Set to be fully completed in the fourth quarter of 2024, SMLD will proactively notify residents as construction begins in their neighborhoods.

The pandemic brought all kinds of innovative approaches to stubborn challenges: Small towns in Grafton County (NH) saw opportunities for business development, innovative school programs, and upgrading the way the local government functioned. But political will didn’t prevent the county from making these changes; poor internet service did. A lot of hard work, political capital and local and federal funding has been committed to improving Grafton County’s connectivity, resulting in the launch of broadband service in the Town of Bristol (NH) in September 2021.

As the CEO of NTCA, Shirley Bloomfield represents an organization that supports 850 independent telecom providers driving broadband service opportunities in the rural and small-town US. With more than 30 years of experience representing the nation’s most rural operators, Bloomfield is an expert on how federal communications policies can sustain the vitality of rural and remote communities and the benefits rural broadband networks offer to millions of US families, businesses and the national economy.

Visionary Broadband in Wyoming focuses on providing quality internet service by customizing products for underserved and rural markets, with a recent emphasis on fiber technology. The company was founded 27 years ago in a small, blue house by three friends who merely wanted internet access. Once they figured out how to get themselves connected, they began getting requests to help others get access as well. Twenty-seven years later, Visionary Broadband employs around 160 people. The idea that the internet could and should be available to anyone was the reason Visionary Broadband came to be.

Southern Tier 8 Regional Board, a multifaceted planning and development agency in New York state, sees broadband as an opportunity to improve the economic situation of the rural communities it serves. Jennifer Gregory, executive director of Southern Tier 8, recently announced Project Connect, an initiative to connect the agency’s entire eight-county region to high-speed broadband.

In Fort Collins (CO), Connexion broadband service broke ground in early 2019, but the desire to equip the city with service dates back more than a decade. Broadband discussions have been incorporated into Fort Collins' strategic plans since 2014. The city's plans now include broadband as a specific strategic objective: “Encourage the development of reliable, high-speed internet services throughout the community.” After years of thoughtful planning and community feedback, Fort Collins began building a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network in February 2019.