The Arkansas State Broadband Office – ARConnect – continues to leverage American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to drive affordable fiber access into underserved parts of the Natural State.

Three funding rounds are winding their way to completion, as fiber connectivity is being made available to rural markets for the first time, with a heavy reliance on local cooperatives.

ARConnect officials say they’ve now awarded more than $534 million in grants that will expand access to 130,000 locations in total, with most of the projects completed by 2030. Including matching funds, $1 billion is expected to be invested in total, bringing notable improvements to an estimated 875,000 Arkansas residents.

The Arkansas ARC Grant Program began in February 2021, using federal Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) Program funding propped up by ARPA, which both Republican Arkansas state senators voted against.

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As of last December, state officials have committed all but $4,832 of its $1.57 billion in ARPA funds to active projects in the state.

ARC Round 1 doled out $118 million in grants to 76 projects, expanding access to approximately 55,700 homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

ARC Round 2 awarded $274.4 million in grants to 87 different projects, impacting approximately 54,000 homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

As digital inclusion advocates look to get their bearings amid an all-out assault on federal broadband funding programs, the next Building For Digital Equity livestream offers a port in the storm.

Slated for March 13 from 3 to 4:15 pm ET – and once again co-hosted by ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) – the keynote speaker for the UTOPIA Fiber sponsored event will be Revati Prasad, Vice President of Programs with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

“Charting the Course: Adapting to Policy Shifts While Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize” promises to bring hundreds of digital inclusion practitioners together to regroup and recalibrate while hearing from those working in the trenches to adequately address broadband access challenges across the nation.

Registration for the increasingly popular live stream is now open here.

Prasad will focus on Benton’s recently published report: “The Human Infrastructure of Broadband: Looking Back, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead.”

The Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) continues to make steady inroads bridging the state’s long standing digital divide on the back of federal grants and a public private-partnership between Lincoln County and Consolidated Communications (Fidum Fiber).

In January, Fidium announced it was beginning construction on the project, which should bring fiber connectivity to 8,300 homes and businesses.

The first phase of the project aims to expand fiber to the towns of Wiscasset, Whitefield, and Edgecomb, as well as parts of Alna and Westport Island. Partial Route 1 closures were required due to fiber installs.

Ultimately, the partnership is also intended to bring fiber access for the first time to Alna, Boothbay, Boothbay Harbor, Dresden, Nobleboro, Southport, Waldoboro, and Woolwich, in neighboring Sagadahoc County.

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This project is being paid for by American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, an MCA grant, and Consolidated Communications (Fidium Fiber). The funding was part of a broader $9.6 million in grant awards announced by the MCA last August, intended to bring fiber to 15,561 homes and businesses across 12 widely underserved communities in the Pine Tree state.

Lincoln County in particular 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.”

“We're thrilled to partner with Fidium to expand their fiber broadband network to our community,” Wiscasset Town Manager Dennis Simmons said of the opportunity.

Officials in Carver County Minnesota continue to make great progress expanding affordable fiber access to the county of 111,000 residents, thanks largely to their publicly-owned open access fiber network CarverLink and their partnership with Metronet.

Since its inception in 2013, Carver County has leveraged public and private collaborations and funding with the goal of making symmetrical gigabit (1 Gbps) fiber available to all locations county wide. With the looming completion of its most recent $10.5 million expansion, CarverLink Fiber Manager Randy Lehs told ISLR they’re getting very close to their ultimate goal.

The county currently has ownership and use of nearly 1,200 miles of fiber throughout Carver County and southern Minnesota connecting more than 280 last mile public and community support locations. Many of these markets have no connectivity; many others are stuck on dated, sluggish, patchy connectivity from regional monopolies.

CarverLink doesn’t provide fiber directly to residents and businesses. Instead it long-ago established a partnership with Metronet (formerly Jaguar Communications), to provide gigabit fiber service to businesses and local residential households. Winner of PCMag's “Fastest Major ISP for 2023” award, Metronet provides multi-gigabit fiber to 300+ communities across 17 states.

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“CarverLink also oversees the availability of dark fiber within our network that is available to qualified service providers or other entities using dark fiber for new opportunities–open access, open interconnect fiber,” Lehs said.  “And through our open access fiber, services are also available from Broadband-MN and Arvig.”

A new provider named Halo Fiber is hoping to leverage hundreds of millions in recent Alabama middle mile broadband network grants to extend affordable fiber broadband to state residents long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The new provider says it’s not quite ready to reveal full launch details (including target markets, speeds, or pricing), but told ILSR it should enter its first four fiber markets later this year thanks in part to a flood of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding in the state.

“We will be releasing pricing and target markets early this summer in May or June,” Halo Co-founder and CEO Brian Snider told ILSR. “Speeds are still being finalized as well but they will be symmetrical from 250 up and down to multi gig options.”

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Halo says its primary focus will be to partner with public and private entities to build fast and affordable broadband networks, empower access to better education, telehealth, and economic opportunities, and ensure quality customer service in neglected markets.

“Ten years ago, myself and other members of the Halo team worked on an initiative that identified infrastructure gaps across the entire state,” Snider said in additional comments to BamaBuzz.

“We found that was a big gap in middle mile connectivity – especially in Alabama’s Black Belt where there was almost no high speed infrastructure,” he added.

Nearly a fifth of Alabama residents – or just over a million people – lack access to reliable high speed Internet.

The $42.5 billion federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program is facing what appears to be a significant overhaul as the new administration aims to alter, among other things, one of program’s key tenets: a preference for building fiber networks.

Meanwhile, a new ILSR policy brief – “BEAD Should Continue to Prioritize Fiber Internet Network Investments” – makes the case for why “these changes would repeat past policy mistakes and waste billions of dollars while delivering subpar Internet access to rural families at much higher prices.”

The brief then describes why fiber networks should continue to be prioritized:

“In designing BEAD, Congress recognized that it was foolish to spend thousands of dollars per home every 5-10 years to deliver obsolete connections and chose instead to build fiber optic networks that will last generations – ultimately both saving taxpayer dollars and delivering an equitable Internet access option to millions of rural homes.”

And while the policy brief points to important long-term consequences that should be considered to ensure rule changes don’t squander a “generational investment” by building “something more temporary and inferior to the services found on every street in urban and suburban areas,” the brief does not argue that other technologies should not be a part of the mix.

“To be clear, BEAD’s priority for fiber does not bar the use of other technologies when appropriate. In cases where the cost of fiber is simply too great, other technologies are on the table – likely wireless options of both terrestrial and low-earth orbit,” the brief says.