We don’t get enough news about government money that is spent well, so today’s news from Mid-Atlantic Broadband is quite welcome. MBC has finished up its BTOP buildout program, coming in on time and under budget.
The $20M project aimed to hook up more than 120 K-12 schools across southern Virginia, which is nearly every one in the region targeted. It’s an open access fiber build with a strictly wholesale focus, with some 45 service providers from the national to the local already up and running. Where there were once expensive DS3s and no options in a neglected rural region, there are now cheap, big (10Mbps-10Gbps) pipes not just in those anchor institutions but along laterals out from the fiber paths to enterprises.
The funding came from $16M of BTOP money and $4M from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, but $1M of that will be going *back* unspent. You don’t often see that with grant money, and frankly too many BTOP projects went in the other direction. Not all of course, but still too many.
Kinda makes you want to see what other projects MBC might want to put together that are worth funding. That is, assuming we had a government that could do such things anymore…
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Government Regulations · Metro fiber
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