![]() Mitchell added that these efforts must be ongoing: “This is more about building connections now.”īroadband.Money is a sponsor of Broadband Breakfast.Cedar Hills and Santa Clara are the latest Utah cities to partner with Murray-based UTOPIA Fiberhome services.Īccording to the UTOPIA news release, completing the two projects will cost approximately $12 million and will mark UTOPIA's 18 th and 19 th fiber-to-the-home cities. In addition to overseeing digital infrastructure projects, communities can promote digital equity by utilizing established, trusted community-based institutions – such as food pantries or faith groups – to boost digital literacy and distribute devices, Mitchell said. “Maybe a lot of those ideas won’t work out, but I think we don’t want to foreclose that path.” “We need to have millions – ideally tens of million – of Americans in thriving areas that have open access to kind of see what we can do with networks,” he said. Mitchell agreed that open access networks can be critical to broadband innovation. Because of the cities inherent role as custodians of their rights of way, Clark said that open-access networks provide cities with the opportunity to own the infrastructure portion of their broadband networks, while still offering private companies the ability to serve as network operators or application service providers. “The cities are the custodians of their rights of way – they need to be, they must be,” said Drew Clark, editor and publisher of Broadband Breakfast. This article by Karl Bode originally appeared on the Institute for Local Self Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks project on March 13, 2023, and is reprinted with permission. Lewis County is one of many PUDs in Washington State taking full advantage of a flood of new grants - and r ecently-eliminated Washington State restrictions on community broadband - to belatedly expand access to affordable fiber across the state. The state is currently considering raising the base definition of broadband to 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream.Ī local survey by Lewis County PUD found that more than 77 percent of survey respondents had broadband speeds well below the acceptable federal definition of broadband, despite nearly 98 percent of county survey participants considering broadband access an essential utility. “This project is really the beginning, in terms of getting service out to folks, and we want to focus on getting broadband out to all rural areas and all residents of Lewis County.”Ī 2021 survey by the WA Department of Commerce found that 64 percent of state households reported download speeds slower than the base FCC definition of broadband, currently a paltry 25 megabit per second (Mbps) downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. “There’s the convenience, there’s business purposes all those are really vital and becoming more and more a part of everyday life, and we want to provide those services to everyone in Lewis County that we can,” Lewis County Manager Erik Martin told The Chronicle. Photo of Lewis County PUD building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. While ToledoTel will install, supply and maintain a new fiber optic network connecting more than 2,300 homes and businesses in the Winlock area, Lewis County will ultimately own the final build. The network will be built as part of a 25-year public-private partnership with ToledoTel. The latest development to have emerged since we last reported on Lewis County PUD, is who the PUD selected as a partner to build the network. Painter noted then how the PUD’s “shovel ready designs and estimates” is what “empowered our utility to be very competitive in going after state and federal grant dollars to help fund these construction deployments.” In December of 2021, Lewis County PUD public affairs manager Willie Painter was a guest on our Community Broadband Bits podcast in which he discussed the PUD’s vision of deploying fiber across the county’s 2,450 square miles, which is home to about 75,000 Washingtonians, or about 30,000 households. Around $23.5 million of that total will be paid for by a recently awarded grant by the Washington State Department of Commerce, itself made possible by the American Rescue Plan Act. In response, the Lewis County PUD announced in 2021 it would be building an 134-mile-long fiber backbone and open access fiber network for around $104 million.
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