Seeking the Commonwealth of Connection

Something remarkable happened in Western Massachusetts in 2018. Over the course of just four months that year, two new municipal fiber networks lit up in tiny towns in the leastdensely populated part of the state. In 2019, three more small towns in the region brought networks online. The next year, seven more communities followed suit. Another seven joined them the following year. Over the course of just four years, 19 towns launched municipal broadband networks, bringing ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access to their communities. The area became the most geographically dense collection of municipal broadband anywhere in the United States. How did they do it? For years, a cadre of volunteers in the region devoted thousands of hours to organizing, research, and advocacy in a region-wide effort to bring Internet access to every resident with no guarantee of success. When state officials doomed the regional project by withdrawing their support, advocates adapted their plans toward individual town ownership. Then, after officials changed the rules of the state grant program to prioritize private Internet Service Providers, broadband boosters in the communities stared down a pressure campaign to abandon municipal ownership — and persevered. Their commitment to local self-reliance and collective well-being was contagious. Voters overwhelmingly approved measures to take on debt in order to pay for network construction, even when it meant raising their own taxes. Often, these debts represented the single largest investment in the town’s history.