The Okanogan County Electric Cooperative (OCEC) and the Okanogan County Public Utility District (PUD) say they’re making steady progress on bringing affordable fiber broadband access to Okanogan County, a highly rural stretch of rugged land in Washington state on the border of Canada.
According to the organizations, the coalition is poised to bring next-generation fiber to as many as 1,366 peppered along the upper Methow Valley this year starting near Chewuch River and ending at Lost River. Many of these areas will be seeing fiber upgrades for the first time ever after years stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
According to a presentation at a town hall last month, officials stated that the project will include 98 miles of underground fiber deployment and 88 miles of new aerial fiber deployment. A mainline backbone fiber between Twisp and Winthrop is completed and functional, providing a redundant loop feed of fiber between the two areas, they stated.
Construction on the project started back in March, and should be completed by the end of the year, OCEC’s contractor, Shawn VanGeystel of Cannon Construction, recently told the Methow Valley News.
The electrical cooperative’s fiber arm is named MethowNet. It offers three tiers of fiber service, though pricing varies slightly between the North and South Valley.
In the North Valley, customers have the option of a symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) “Basic” tier for $79 a month; a symmetrical 250 Mbps “Advanced” tier for $109 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) “Gigabit” tier for $149 a month.
In the South Valley, customers have the option of a symmetrical 50 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up “Basic” tier for $69 a month; a 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up “Advanced” tier for $89 a month; or a symmetrical 100 Mbps “Premium” tier for $99 a month.
The expansion was made possible due to $14.5 million in grants from the Washington State Broadband Office and another $500,000 from Okanogan County. The lion’s share of that funding came via the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
OCEC and the Okanogan County PUD are looking to expand fiber to the entire valley in 2027 and 2028. The cooperative had hoped to obtain some of Washington State’s $736 million in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding.
But say they found themselves holding the short end of the stick after the Trump administration retooled the program to deprioritize the expansion of fiber, instead redirecting billions of dollars toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s Low-Earth orbit satellite companies for congestion, costly LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite service they already planned to deploy.
At a March town hall meeting, OCEC General Manager Greg Mendonca characterized the BEAD changes and how it undercut the project's financing:
“BEAD … went from buzzword to kind of buzz saw. We ran into an issue where the federal government changed the rules of the road post-application, and we were not successful.”
Inline image of students at Okanogan PUD bootcamp courtesy of Okanogan PUD Facebook page
