When it comes to community-owned and operated networks, better, faster, cheaper broadband is often only one of the benefits. Some telephone cooperatives, like Paul Bunyan Communications in Northern Minnesota’s Beltrami County, share profits with its members, literally paying the benefits of shared telecom ownership back into the communities they serve.

The Cooperative recently announced it was giving a $3.6 million profit windfall back to local community members. It’s the fourth such payout to local subscribers in the last seven years.

For distributions of $150 or less, a credit was applied to subscriber’s bills. For sums greater than $150, the cooperative mailed checks out to locals.

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With origins that owe a part of its success to the Beltrami Electric Cooperative, it was in 1996 when locals were first offered broadband access through Paul Bunyan Telephone. Three years later, it began the necessary infrastructure upgrades that allowed it to offer phone, high-speed Internet access, and digital television.

In 2005, the cooperative expanded with fiber technology for the first time. In 2010, Paul Bunyan Telephone changed its name to Paul Bunyan Communications. 

“Our cooperative continues to grow and thrive, now serving over 35,000 active members across over a 6,000-square-mile service area,” said Paul Bunyan Communications CEO Chad Bullock.

“Through steady investment and expansion, we’ve built one of the nation’s largest rural all-fiber [networks], transforming how our members live, work, and play. It’s incredibly rewarding to see that success come full circle as we share the benefits with our members.”

Vermont’s Otter Creek Communications Union District not only recently finished its major fiber deployment, CUD leaders say the project came in significantly under budget, saving Vermont state leaders more than $3 million in taxpayer dollars. That money will now be redirected toward efforts to make access more affordable for state residents.

As we recently reported, Otter Creek CUD completed a major fiber expansion project that brought affordable fiber to 3,626 locations, including 1,278 previously unserved addresses across heavily rural parts of the Rutland County region of the Green Mountain State.

The project was funded by a $10 million grant by the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB). Between the Otter Creek grant awards and contributions from private providers, more than $24 million was invested in Rutland County to expand fiber access.

In a new announcement, Otter Creek CUD officials say the build, made possible by a lot of hard work by local volunteers, ultimately came in more than $3 million under budget, money CUD leaders say will now be used to improve network quality and affordability.

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“We are so proud of this tremendous accomplishment,” VCBB Executive Director Christine Hallquist said of the project. “It’s a great example of how Vermonters can benefit from the local leadership of CUDs in negotiating with private telecoms.”

Update Below - New Information

NTIA, the federal office administering the largest single investment to expand Internet access across the nation, appears to once again be changing the BEAD program in ways that would only force states to further reduce investment in rural areas.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the NTIA office, has already introduced delays to the $42.5 billion Internet access expansion program, creating a year-long slow-down at a time when many states could be already connecting homes.

Now, even as the administration claims to be expediting the process, NTIA seems to have added yet another time-consuming wrinkle: a super secret “Best and Final Offer” round imposed on states after submitting final proposals.

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A quick reminder of where we are: states were forced to redo all their work in recent weeks to follow new rules aimed at cutting costs by making the program demonstrably worse for hundreds of thousands of families.

Rather than spend money to help get these families access to comparably affordable fiber networks, states now have to push billions toward low-Earth orbit satellite services which offer them far worse connectivity at much higher prices to each subscriber. And yet, NTIA called this process of reducing investment in rural America the “Benefit of the Bargain” round.

Michigan-based Thumb Electric Cooperative says its ongoing fiber deployment has hit a new milestone: its 4000th connected broadband subscriber.

The cooperative’s latest customer, Verona Hills Golf Course in Huron County, Michigan, comes three years after the cooperative joined the growing trend of expanding into broadband access.

"We're very proud to reach this milestone," Cooperative Marketing and Communication Specialist Mitch Hirn said of the cooperative’s ongoing expansion.

"We look to continue our buildout over the next few years. We want more people to sign up for high-speed, reliable internet. The vast majority of our customers have been very pleased with our service."

In deployed markets Thumb offers two tiers of fiber broadband service via its TEC Fiber subsidiary: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $85 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) offering for $125 a month. The cooperative’s fiber tiers do not feature usage caps, hidden fees, or long-term contracts.

First created in 1938, the Thumb Electric Cooperative is one of over 200 U.S. electrical cooperatives leveraging their century-old experience in rural electrification to bring affordable fiber access to long-neglected parts of the country – markets that in most cases were left behind by regional telecom monopolies disinterested in improving affordable access.

According to data from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), 700 of the nation’s 900 electrical cooperatives have yet to expand into broadband access, so there’s plenty of legroom for additional cooperatives to join the ongoing trend.

In early 2023, Dryden, New York, formally launched the town’s municipal broadband network, becoming the first municipality in the state to provide residents with direct access to affordable, publicly owned fiber.

A year and a half later, and the town of 14,500 says they’ve just signed up their 400th subscriber and continue to make steady progress expanding the popular network into rural enclaves in and around Dryden long deemed “unprofitable” by regional telecom monopolies.

Dryden Fiber Executive Director David Makar tells Ithaca-based local news outlet 607 News Now that the first year and a half of operations focused on building the core fiber ring around the city.

They’ve since shifted to the time-consuming task of extending last mile fiber access out to rural unserved and underserved homes in Dryden and nearby Caroline (population 3,321).

“There’s about 500 households between Dryden and Caroline that if they want to get online – it’s dial up modems, like it’s the year 2000,” Makar says. “Since we are very rural…there’s no easy way to get a lot of these houses,” he notes, indicating that the logistics and permissions for rural pole attachments have been unsurprisingly time consuming.

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Makar said there’s about 800 homes currently waiting for access in many of these rural areas.

The Paulding Putnam Electric Cooperative (PPEC) says it has officially launched the construction of a major new residential fiber expansion project that should dramatically improve affordable fiber access across major swaths of Northwest Ohio and Northeast Indiana.

According to an announcement by the co-op, mainline construction of the extended network technically started last April in the Haviland and Latty substation area, and extended during the month of June to the Roselm substation area.

The first fiber customer is expected to be connected to the new residential fiber service starting this fall. The full project is expected to be completed by 2028, when the cooperative says it will determine whether it’s going to extend into non-member territories.

Founded in 1935, PPEC currently serves roughly 13,000 electrical customers across Ohio and Indiana. The cooperative says it’s partnering with counties and villages throughout Ohio and Indiana to identify areas of need and “ensure that expansion efforts align with local priorities.”

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The cooperative Board of Trustees unanimously voted to provide fiber internet as a new service offered by the co-op in July of 2024. The co-op says it has budgeted around $4 million in 2025 for system reliability upgrades (including 20 miles of old copper line rebuilds) and fiber installation efforts.