Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Cities Corinth and Lake Dallas as well as towns Hickory Creek and Shady Shores (TX), collectively known as the Lake Cities, are seeking a public-private partnership to deploy a fiber network to households and businesses in the area. The project, with the help of $4 million in American Rescue Plan funds, would include building a middle-mile fiber ring to support government services around the four cities, connecting public buildings and facilities.

With the first traunch of American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds going out to counties and cities in summer 2021, many local leaders have begun to propose projects and seek input from citizens about how they should be used.

Decatur (IL) is moving forward with an Institutional Network (I-Net) expansion that will connect 11 school districts and 3 firehouses to its growing fiber-optic backbone, connecting potential commercial and industry customers along the way. The city of Decatur has been expanding its fiber network since 2014.

Demand for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity across the 4.74-square-mile Vinton, Iowa, community (est. pop.

Nonprofit Alleghenies Broadband is leading a cohesive effort across a six-county region in south-central Pennsylvania to bring high-speed Internet access to areas that are unserved or underserved by reliable networks. Part of its work is a recently completed Request for Proposals (RFP) in search of forming a series of public-private partnerships to help identify target areas and offer robust solutions to bring new infrastructure to the businesses and residents who need it most.

Between the US Treasury clarifying that American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds are eligible to be spent on middle-mile infrastructure and the Senate infrastructure bill's proposed $1 billion grant program to support the deployment of middle-mile networks, federal assistance aiming to improve middle-mile access is imminent. Investing in public middle-mile infrastructure can be essential to create competition in broken markets.