The Institute for Local Self Reliance has released their new version of our Community Network Map, showing where municipal networks operate across the United States and how they are acting to bring new service, competition, and more affordable connectivity to places around the country.

Communities invest in telecommunications networks for a variety of reasons – economic development, improving access to education and health care, price stabilization, etc. They range from massive networks offering multi-gigabit service to hundreds of thousands of households to small towns connecting a few local businesses. In the map above, networks that serve more than one community are connected by a web – there is no particular significance to the center point in the web, other than to serve as a common connection point.

This map tracks a variety of ways in which local governments have invested in wired telecommunications networks as well as state laws that discourage such approaches.

Our map includes 400 municipal networks serving more than 700 communities. More than 200 of those communities are served by a publicly owned network which blankets the entire city with fiber infrastructure (Updated September 2024).

We continue to expand this map with other forms of publicly owned networks, including Indigenously owned networks and telephone and electric cooperatives. Get updates by signing up for our one-email-per-week list announcing new stories and resources.

The screenshots below show how Minnesota compares to the rest of the country. The images on the real site are easily to see:

You can search by location. I found 38 communities searching for Minnesota. Drilling down to info on each community, you can learn the population, provider and business model of the network (retail, open access, conduit, institutional and/or non-retail).