A fiber optic network project by 31 Massachusetts towns is indefinitely delayed because of state apathy and delays in approval and funding
Susan Crawford / Backchannel : Tweets: @bryanalexander , @jujueyeball and @jessamyn Tweets: Bryan Alexander / @bryanalexander : Rural broadband is all too often a serious problem in the US: http://backchannel.com/... Daniel Massoglia / @jujueyeball : .@scrawford great again; on high speed fiber coops in Western Mass & new governor's sabotage http://backchannel.com/... http://twitter.com/... Jessamyn West / @jessamyn : Why Western MA broadband infrastructure is bad and not improving. Fear of “co-ops” and political bickering. http://backchannel.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 31-town Western Massachusetts fiber push grew out of a smaller effort: last summer, 22 towns were already building their own gigabit fiber network on the municipal model. What has changed is not ambition but pace — the coalition widened while state approval and funding stalled, leaving the project indefinitely delayed.
The region is not working from a blank map. Neighboring Connecticut towns are on a path toward wholesale fiber networks, making Massachusetts' inaction conspicuous by comparison, and the tweets circulating with this piece frame it as political hostility to co-ops under the new governor rather than mere bureaucratic slowness.
First-order effects
- The 31 towns stay without gigabit service for the indefinite future, and the municipal network they organized around cannot proceed until the state moves on approvals and funding.
Second-order effects
- With the state unresponsive, these towns' realistic fallback shifts to federal programs — but the related coverage shows that route is also congested: over half of the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund footprint had already been covered by at least one prior program (per the WSJ analysis), and the $42.5B underserved-area budget is being withheld until new FCC maps arrive.
Third-order effects
- If state-level apathy toward municipal broadband persists, community fiber projects across the US become structurally dependent on slow federal funding cycles — a dependency that leaves rural districts exposed when connectivity suddenly becomes critical, as it did when schools went remote during the pandemic.
The trend: US rural broadband is migrating from locally driven municipal networks toward federally funded programs whose disbursement bottlenecks now set the pace of deployment.