The Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA), Maine’s quasi-governmental public agency in charge of broadband expansion and digital equity, is seeking proposals to help design and construct a major 536-mile fiber network that should dramatically improve affordable fiber access across vast swaths of the Pine Tree State.

For several years Maine officials have proposed spending $53 million to build a major middle mile fiber network known as the Maine Online Optical Statewide Enabling Network (MOOSE Net).

The middle mile network would extend fiber into numerous underserved Maine communities, boosting broadband competition and access while hopefully lowering prices.

Last year, Maine received a $30 million grant to help fund the network’s construction, courtesy of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s (NTIA) $980 million Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program. The MCA’s proposal was one of just 32 proposals selected out of 260 applicants for federal broadband funding.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office has unveiled a new round of broadband grants that will expand fiber access to unserved homes and businesses across 23 Alabama counties. This latest round of grants should help fund 2,347 miles of new fiber deployment, bringing broadband availability to more than 15,000 locations scattered across the Yellowhammer state.

The funding – made largely possible by 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money that both of the state’s Senators voted against – comes on the heels of another $150 million broadband funding round announced back in February.

“With these latest grants, Alabama takes another all-important step to supplying high-speed Internet availability to more rural Alabama communities and neighborhoods,” Ivey said in a statement. “Upon completion of these projects, more children will have better learning opportunities, more businesses will have greater opportunities to compete worldwide, and emergency response departments and medical clinics will be able to offer improved services.”

Both funding rounds were heavily dominated by large private telecoms like AT&T, Charter, and Brightspeed. But the state has also been doling out some sizable awards to local cooperatives in a bid to shore up rural fiber access.

Choptank Electric Cooperative says the Denton, Maryland-based co-op is making significant progress on efforts to deliver fiber access to largely underserved residents of the Old Line State.

In 2021, Choptank decided to begin extending residential fiber broadband service to the cooperative’s 56,000 residential, commercial, and industrial metered accounts scattered across nine counties on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Since that promise, the cooperative says it has passed more than 13,000 locations statewide.

In a meeting with Worcester County Commissioners in early September, Choptank officials stated they’ve delivered fiber to 1,112 locations in Worcester County and have 471 currently active subscribers. Just about 42 percent of county residents that have access to Choptank’s fiber offerings have subscribed. The cooperative has received roughly $1 million in county funds.

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Choptank provides residential customers three tiers of fiber service: symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $85 a month; symmetrical 450 Mbps service for $100 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $140 a month; and symmetrical 2.5 Gbps service for $280 a month.

Blueprints for BEAD is a series of short notes and analysis on nuances of BEAD that might otherwise get lost in the volume of material published on this federal funding program. Click the “Blueprints for BEAD” tag at the bottom of this story for other posts.

Few people dispute the vital importance of affordability in closing the digital divide. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of all people without broadband cited cost as a barrier, with 20 percent listing cost as the primary reason for not subscribing to broadband service.

Research from EducationSuperHighway pegged that number even higher, estimating that lack of affordability explained about two thirds of the remaining digital divide in the country.

As the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program steams ahead, questions about affordability have come to the fore. After all, deploying tens of thousands of miles of new fiber is only half the equation. BEAD will help build the physical networks necessary to connect the millions of households that still lack access to high-speed Internet service, but will it make a difference if they still can’t afford a plan? This possibility is all the more likely in light of the Affordability Connectivity Program’s (ACP) untimely demise.

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BEAD’s low-cost plan requirement sought to ease such concerns about affordability. To ensure households with limited financial means would actually see the benefits of the program’s massive infrastructure investment, this requirement mandated that all networks built using BEAD funds offer a low-cost plan for eligible subscribers.

The North Carolina nonprofit telephone cooperative FOCUS Broadband nabbed $5.4 million in grant funding from the state’s Department of Information Technology (NCDIT) to extend its fiber network to 800 additional rural homes and businesses in heavily unserved portions of both Chowan and Perquimans counties.

According to a company announcement, the funding was provided by the North Carolina Completing Access To Broadband (CAB) grant program, made possible, in turn, by the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). With an end of the year obligation deadline looming, communities are mobilizing to ensure ARPA-related funds have been fully committed.

Of the total $5.4 million in total state funding, FOCUS says that $1.9 million will be used to expand high-speed Internet service to over 300 addresses in Chowan County, with $3.4 million of the funds being utilized to bring high-speed Internet service to an additional 588 addresses in Perquimans County. Currently, the cooperative provides broadband services to 71,000 residents and businesses.

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FOCUS Broadband CEO Keith Holden indicates the cooperative will contribute approximately $1 million of its own money to the projects, with Chowan and Perquimans counties providing a combined $338,806 in additional funding.

Maine’s state broadband office, the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA), has unveiled $9.6 million in new grant awards to help bring affordable fiber to 15,561 homes and businesses across 12 widely underserved communities in the Pine Tree state.

According to the announcement by the MCA, the grants will primarily be focused on leveraging public-private partnerships to drive fiber into unserved locations in Waldo and Lincoln Counties.

The grants are part of the MCA’s Partnerships for Enabling Middle Mile Program (PEMM), which addresses large-scale, regional broadband needs by leveraging middle mile infrastructure.

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Lincoln County saw a grant award of $6 million matched by $24.3 million in private and public investment including county ARPA funds (which the MCA notes was the “highest percentage of financial commitment from any public-private partnership awarded through an MCA program to date”).

The deployment, which is expected to begin in 2025, involves a partnership between Lincoln County and Consolidated Communications and will bring fiber that passes 14,436 homes and businesses in Woolwich (in Sagadahoc County), Wiscasset, Alna, Dresden, Boothbay, Edgecomb, Waldoboro, Whitefield and Nobleboro.

“This is probably the most exciting thing since cable TV came into any of these towns,” Evan Goodkowsky, broadband infrastructure consultant for Coastal Maine Regional Broadband, told the Lincoln County News.