Category Archives: Building Broadband Tools

Fidium now serves 30,000 homes and businesses in southern Minnesota (Blue Earth, Nicollet and Le Sueur Counties)

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Radio Mankato reports on Fidium broadband expansion…

“Southern Minnesota communities deserve reliable fiber infrastructure,” said Kari Juni, vice president of Copper-to-Fiber & Network Transformation for Fidium. “This expansion reflects our focus on rural broadband, where systematic fiber access opens real opportunities for student learning, local business growth, and workforce retention. It’s the kind of infrastructure investment these communities need to thrive.”

Fidium now reaches more than 30,000 homes and businesses in southern Minnesota and greater-Mankato, and delivers future-ready speeds over its 5,000‑mile all‑fiber network in the state. Communities with fiber access include Eagle Lake, Garden City, Good Thunder, Janesville, Lake Crystal, Madison Lake, Mankato, Mapleton, New Richland, Nicollet, North Mankato, St. Clair, St. James and Vernon Center, with more locations to be connected soon across the state.

Will the workforce be ready for building data centers and rural networks when BEAD projects hit the streets?

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RCR Wireless News reports…

The US has two infrastructure priorities converging on one scarce resource: people who know how to build networks. AI data centers are sucking skilled workers into a construction boom, just as the long-delayed BEAD initiative finally starts moving into deployment. And actually, it is not just about the fiber technicians; the same labor pool includes electricians, HVAC specialists, surveyors, trenchers, engineers, and other trades needed to build broadband networks. The numbers are already uncomfortable. The industry was estimated in 2024 to be short around 58,000 workers to meet BEAD’s goals. AT&T plans to add 3,000 technicians this year. Meta has its own fiber-training programme. Meanwhile, the US telco workforce has fallen from 1.4 million in 2001 to fewer than 598,000 in 2025.

There is a stark economic imbalance here, of course. A hyperscaler or major carrier building AI infrastructure can afford recruitment, training, and wages that smaller community-based broadband operators cannot. Every worker pulled toward a lucrative data-center project is potentially one less available for a rural fiber build. And this is before the AI construction boom really peaks. Economist Anirban Basu expects labor pressure to worsen in 2027 as AI infrastructure spending expands. So the irony is clear: America’s AI infrastructure boom could make it harder, slower, and more expensive to deliver the connectivity needed by Americans still waiting for broadband.

Heartland Fiber Network to Cross Minnesota

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Ingstad Media reports...

A planned 700-million-dollar fiber-optic network will pass through Minnesota as it connects Denver and Chicago. A crew is currently working in Morris and Benson.

The Heartland Fiber Project will add roughly two-thousand miles of underground fiber across Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. The system will include connections around Minneapolis.

The network is designed primarily to move large amounts of data between data centers, including traffic generated by artificial-intelligence systems.

Project partners say the added capacity could also improve connectivity for businesses, schools, healthcare providers and government agencies. The announcement does not promise direct residential broadband service or identify every Minnesota community along the final route.

Construction is scheduled to continue for one to two years.

Doug Dawson looks at recent rights-or-way decisions with railroads

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Doug Dawson from CCG Consulting reports…

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals made a recent ruling that could end up eliminating one of the biggest rights-of-way issues that slow down fiber construction projects. In the case of CSX Transportation v. Zayo Group, LLC, the court ruled that the easement that CSX owns for its railroad tracks only applies to the surface of the Earth and that the railroad right-of-way does not extend either above or below the tracks.

The court said specifically that the installation of underground fiber lines or overhead fiber lines that are tall enough not to interfere with trains does not constitute “continuous trespass”. This ruling means that Zayo is free to place the fiber without the railroad company’s permission and that Zayo doesn’t have to pay any one-time or ongoing fees for the rights-of-way.

The court said that the right-of-way still belongs to the actual landowner. That’s an important distinction, because most railroad lines were granted an easement to build the railroad lines, and were not given outright ownership of the land. The land under the tracks is still owned by a local government or a private landowner. Since most fiber crossings for railroads happen where the railroad tracks cross a public road, then the state, county, or city that maintains that road still owns the actual rights-of-way and can grant it to a fiber overbuilder just like they grant rights-of-way along all public roads.

It’s an interesting decision and one, that as Doug points out, could have some loud repercussions. Permitting and rights-or-way have always been roadblocks, or at least slow-downs for providers and this is adding to the uncertainty. A whole new look at the wrong side of the tracks!

 

Cautionary tale of permitting pricing in MN

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Broadband Breakfast reports…

A Minnesota city recently told a broadband provider what it would cost to run fiber down a single city block: a $63,000 permit fee, plus nearly $29,000 in per-foot charges. More than $90,000, for one block. The provider offered a compromise on how the fiber would be buried. The city refused. So the provider walked away, and that block stayed offline.

That case is documented in the FCC’s public record, and it’s one of the starker ones. But the pattern behind it is common. A fiber route or tower upgrade can clear design, secure financing, and line up a crew, then stall at a local permit counter over fees and timelines that bear little relation to the actual work.

Senators Barrasso and Lummis introduce bill to increase access to Broadband on Federal land

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Senator John Barrasso website reports…

 Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) introduced legislation to increase access to high-speed internet on federal land. The CLOSE THE GAP Act will streamline the permitting process for broadband and telecommunications infrastructure on federal land to expand access to high-speed internet in rural areas. The bill is cosponsored by U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

More information…

Background:

In order to streamline the permitting process for broadband infrastructure, the CLOSE THE GAP Act requires federal land management agencies to issue new regulations that would streamline the process for broadband applications on federal land. The bill also promotes online application tracking for broadband infrastructure projects through the existing Permitting Dashboard established under the FAST Act.

The bill also accelerates broadband deployment by expanding categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and limiting additional environmental and historic preservation reviews for certain broadband projects on federal land. The exclusion criteria would apply to:

  • Projects involving existing public safety communications facilities on federal land
  • Projects located on previously analyzed federal land
  • Federal land with existing authorized utilities, powerline facilities, or roads

The bill would establish online portals for submission of Standard Form-299 applications. It would also establish a special account at Treasury for each land management agency to deposit cost recovery fees for their own use related specifically to broadband deployment. Lastly, the bill would establish a working group between each federal land management agency to periodically meet to coordinate and expedite the review of applications.

Full text of the legislation can be found here.

Podcast: Click Here: The village that built the internet

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Yesterday, I was driving to family brunch on Sunday and tuned in at just the right time to MPR to hear an interesting story of tribal broadband. Here’s the description from the Click Here website…

To live in the modern world, you have to be online. But in many places, that connection still doesn’t exist. So people aren’t waiting. They’re building their own internet—creating and running their own providers from the ground up. And in the process, redefining who gets to connect… and who gets to decide.

It’s a story of need, ingenuity and the power of community. They touch on non-tribal public broadband but the example they give is a tribal community. The podcast captures what I’ve heard from folks in the field about the importance of sovereignty.

Midwest FiberPath to build multi-conduit long-haul backbone to support AI

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Telecompetitor reports…

Midwest FiberPath says it will build a 1,200-mile multi-conduit long-haul backbone intended to support the increased traffic created by artificial intelligence (AI) in east-west and north-south directions in the Midwest. It will provide what it describes as next-generation carrier mesh diversity.

More details…

The long-haul topography will have three primary corridors:

  • Joliet, Illinois to Des Moines, Iowa to Council Bluffs, Iowa: This multi-conduit route will support hyperscale east-west traffic fabrics between Chicago interconnection ecosystems and numerous Iowa compute campuses.

  • Minneapolis, Minnesota to Des Moines, Iowa to Kansas City, Missouri: This corridor, also multi-conduit, will run north-south and enable regional mesh diversity and alternative long-haul routing across the central U.S.

  • Minneapolis, Minnesota to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to Joliet, Illinois: This will be a diagonal extension reinforcing Iowa as a center-node aggregation point for multi-directional traffic exchange.

Willmar City Council delays announcement of Willmar Connect broadband plan

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Willmar City Council had planned to announce the broadband plans at Monday’s council meeting. Instead, West Central Tribune reports…

Consideration for awarding the bid for the Willmar Connect initiative was expected to be on the Willmar City Council agenda on Monday, Jan. 5, but that agenda item was again delayed.

When asked why, City Operations Director Kyle Box explained the agreements with the internet service providers that will be operating on the network and paying fees to the city were not yet ready for approval.

He also shared that the low bid, about which the City Council was briefed on Dec. 15, is ready for approval, but the ISP agreements also need to be ready for approval to ensure the council members that the project is financially feasible.

A little more on the low bid…

The low bid from NC3 of Clearbrook, Minnesota, for phase one is in the amount of approximately $7.6 million. The city expects to collect a fee between $40 and $44 per subscription from the ISPs that use the network, according to Box.

Fiber supply threatens US broadband targets

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Light Reading reports…

Warnings about a US fiber crunch that could slow down broadband deployment have intensified since the summer. In August, Incab America, a Texan maker of fiber-optic cable, notified customers that “a significant fiber shortage is emerging” in a statement signed by Mike Riddle, its president, who blamed data centers for “sucking up all the fiber production capacity.” The situation reminded him of 2000, when lead times lengthened to a year. They have now risen to the same level, said a separate industry source who requested anonymity.

That compares with normal lead times of between eight and 12 weeks, according to the same source. Even when there is some tightness in the supply chain, they never usually exceed 15 to 20 weeks, he said. But a wave of investment in data centers, built to train AI’s large language models (LLMs), has quickly gobbled supplies of glass and other materials used in fiber-optic cables. “The three leading glass manufacturers in the United States are experiencing challenges in meeting this heightened demand,” observed Riddle in August. “Notably, one manufacturer has already sold all of its fiber inventory through the year 2026.”

Policies may also have an impact…

Yet surging demand from AI data centers is not the only problem. Sourcing components from overseas has also become harder because of the tariff restrictions Trump has slapped on imports of foreign goods. There is some industry frustration, too, about the need to comply with the rules of the Build America, Buy America (BABA) Act signed into law by Joe Biden, Trump’s White House predecessor, in November 2021.

Under BABA’s provisions, initiatives are ineligible for government financial aid “unless all of the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in the project are produced in the United States.” That has ramifications for companies participating in the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, which draws on government funds to extend network coverage into hard-to-reach and underserved communities.

EVENT Jan 13-15: Clearfield launches Tribal broadband technician training program in Brooklyn Park MN

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Telecompetitor reports…

Tribal residents will have access to certified broadband training through fiber optic equipment company Clearfield Inc.’s new Tribal Broadband Training Initiative.

The free three-day course is accredited by the Fiber Optic Association for Certified Fiber Optic Technician (CFOT) training. It combines hands-on elements with classroom learning. The course covers inside plant, outside plant, and access network applications.

The goal is to offer a broadband training session each quarter near Tribal lands. The inaugural session will be held January 13–15 at Clearfield’s headquarters in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Subsequent sessions will be held from April 7–9 at the Hopi Telecommunications office in Keams Canyon, Arizona, and from July 21–23 at Tri County Tech in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Willmar Connect bids to build open-access broadband are coming in

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The West Central Tribune reports…

The West Central Tribune reports…

The city of Willmar announced Wednesday that it opened bids for phase one of the city-wide, open-access broadband project known as Willmar Connect, with the apparent low bid coming in under the estimated costs for phase one construction.

Phase one involves constructing the network operations center and installing fiber throughout all the neighborhoods west of First Street South, between U.S. Highway 12 and 19th Avenue. Phase one may expand into areas within phase two of the project if there are clusters of residents and businesses who have completed the advance sign-up for the service.

The infrastructure will be owned by the city and the network will be managed by Hometown Fiber. Multiple internet service providers can contract with the city to offer services on the network for a fee, which will be used to pay the principal and interest on the bonds that will fund the construction of the project. Eventually, those fees are expected to generate revenue for the city, as well.

If approved by the Willmar City Council on Dec. 15, construction of phase one of the Willmar Connect project will begin in early 2026. The project has been a long time coming since it was first considered in 2022, with thorough vetting and research completed by the city to ensure its success.

Bipartisan bill to fast-track broadband expansion by smoothing access to rights of way

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Senator Blackburn’s website reports…

U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) introduced the bipartisan Broadband and Telecommunications RAIL Act that would streamline the process to deploy telecommunications and broadband equipment in public and railroad rights-of-way. Rights-of-way are the corridors alongside public roads and railroad tracks where utilities can install infrastructure.

“Access to reliable, high-speed telecommunications and broadband is a necessity for working families, schools, and businesses,” said Senator Blackburn. “The Broadband and Telecommunications RAIL Act would cut red tape to streamline the installation of telecommunications and broadband equipment in public and railroad rights-of-way, expanding essential connectivity for rural communities in Tennessee and across America.

“I’m proud to introduce legislation that will make it easier to expand broadband in rural and Tribal communities across New Mexico. Expanding broadband access strengthens local economies and opens the door to better education, job opportunities, and health care,” said Senator Luján, Ranking Member of Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media. “With nearly 2,000 miles of freight rail across our state, this bill streamlines broadband construction along rail corridors to help connect regions that have long been underserved.”

The FCC and Congress make moves to streamline broadband permitting at federal level

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State Scoop reports…

The Federal Communications Commission and Congress are considering reforms to numerous broadband permitting processes across the country, with the aim of accelerating deployment. Most changes would potentially preempt state and local government rules.

The House Energy Subcommittee on Communications and Technology on Tuesday heard amendments and marked up 28 bills that would streamline broadband permitting, passing several Republican-led measures to rollback regulations.

And the FCC this week has formally kicked off consideration of new measures to reform broadband permitting. That process includes public comments solicited through a notice of inquiry published in September. The agency’s deadline for initial comments passed on Monday, and reply comments are due in mid-December.

Both efforts follow frustrations over the last several years with the broadband infrastructure permitting process, magnified by billions of dollars of federal investment across the states. The Biden administration created a number of federal broadband programs to expand access to high-speed, broadband internet through the former president’s Internet for All initiative, which was created by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

The article goes on to explain the impact on some proposed changes on state and local role…

Following roll call votes, the subcommittee voted favorably on seven bills, sending them to the full committee for consideration, including one that would set “shot clocks” for permitting, giving state and local agencies 150 days to approve or deny new construction permits, and 90 days to respond to permit applications to modify existing broadband infrastructure. Requests that don’t receive responses within those timeframes would be automatically approved.

Pew looks at what Broadband Workforce Expected needs to do to meet BEAD requirements

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Pew Research reports…

The success of federal broadband investments—especially the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program—depends on whether the U.S. has enough trained workers to build and maintain a workforce. Evidence suggests that worker shortages, misaligned training timelines, and inconsistent data could delay states from meeting BEAD’s ambitious deadlines.

On June 6, 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce updated the BEAD implementation guidance. The new rules require states to reopen provider selection, which could delay funding in some places and accelerate it in others—making worker readiness more urgent. In addition, the suspension of nondeployment funds reduces resources that states had planned to use for workforce development.

Workforce challenges have already been widely cited as risk factors in almost every state. According to an analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts, 41 states and Washington, D.C., identified workforce challenges in their BEAD or Digital Equity Act (DEA) plans: DEA was a separate Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) program that provided support for digital adoption and workforce training, but was canceled in May 2025.1 Those challenges included barriers for workers trying to join the industry and a lack of detailed federal job classification data—suggesting that workforce shortages are not only local but a potential nationwide barrier to BEAD implementation.

They mention some work that they feel might streamline the process…

Key findings include:

  • The pool of skilled telecommunications workers is shrinking just as demand is rising sharply. Policymakers should examine the barriers to growth for specific broadband-related occupations to meet both short- and long-term needs.
  • Training requirements mean new workers cannot be mobilized quickly, raising risks of deployment delays.
  • Competitive wages and benefit packages are crucial as telecommunications employers compete for workers across industries or those who are supporting other infrastructure projects funded through the IIJA.
  • Inconsistency in jobs classifications in federal data obscure workforce needs. Greater collaboration between employers and federal and state governments is needed to standardize data and improve planning.

And, in case you’re thinking about the workforce or jobs…

In assessments of workforce needs specific to BEAD, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said the following workers are needed to expand broadband infrastructure:

  • Equipment operators.
  • Fiber and wireless technicians.
  • Inspectors.
  • Laborers and manual movers.
  • Master and stage electricians.
  • Network architects and coordinators.
  • Radio frequency and field engineers.
  • Software engineers.
  • Structural engineers.
  • Surveyors and drafters.
  • Trenchers.
  • Trucking crews.2