Fiber Broadband Association: Optics — This fall, City Utilities, the city owned utility in Springfield, MO marked the ‘half-way to completion’ of their 1,000 mile citywide fiber network. Originally envisioned to serve the growing connectivity needs of the utility and community, the fiber network was strategically designed with excess capacity for broadband service providers to lease access and deliver high performance residential and business Internet citywide.

The network’s anchor tenant, Lumen, is utilizing portions of the utilities’ network to deliver symmetric Gigabit Internet to Springfield’s 180,000 residents and businesses. Following last year’s successful completion of Huntsville Utilities’ city-wide fiber network with Google Fiber as the anchor tenant, City Utilities marks the second successful deployment of what is referred to as the Utility Lease Model.

“Since our projects launch in March 2020 Springfield has already experienced economic development benefits including new companies like Amazon and Costco entering the area and bringing new workers with them,” said Jeff Bertholdi, Director of SpringNet. “At a time when the importance of connectivity has never been clearer, we are pleased with the benefits this network is providing to the utility and the community that we serve.”

Originally planned for completion in Spring 2023, the citywide fiber network is expected to be fully complete ahead of schedule in late 2022.

To learn more about SpringNet, please visit: https://www.springnet.net/