Traverse City, Michigan’s public, community-owned utility, Traverse City Light and Power (TCL&P), is putting the finishing touches on its $14 million plan to deliver affordable fiber to the community of 15,424. With build out estimates significantly lower than initial projections, the utility is finalizing an additional $1 million in loans to fund the recently started expansion project.
Already named last month to the 2025 Broadband Communities Top 100 list, a recent update by the city notes that the utility is currently extending the network to the Base of Old Mission Peninsula, Hastings, Parsons, Munson, and Barlow.
Complete citywide deployment is expected by the Spring of 2026, though the city says it maintains a “stretch goal” of completing the entirety of the “rapid deployment” by this fall.
In deployed markets, locals have three speed and pricing options: a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $90 a month; a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month; and a symmetrical 200 Mbps option for $60 a month.
None of the options come with long-term contracts, hidden fees, or usage caps. All three broadband tiers can be bundled with phone service for an additional $10 a month.
Like countless U.S. communities, Traverse City locals were tired by expensive, spotty, substandard broadband access being provided by regional telecom monopolies. In Traverse City that usually means a monopoly on broadband access by Charter Spectrum, peppered with some scattered Brightspeed (formerly Lumen and Centurylink) DSL and fiber lines.
In a bid to expand access to affordable access, in 2017 TCL&P’s board voted unanimously to move forward with a citywide fiber build in initial partnership with Fujitsu.
TCL&P currently serves about 13,267 utility meters, and, like many city-owned utilities and cooperatives, has leveraged experience in electrification to expand into broadband access. TCL&P launched its fiber to the home broadband network back in 2020 starting with the more populated downtown areas.
Citywide expansion planning was completed last August, and construction began in earnest this fall.
Upgrades will not only provide multi-gigabit per second speeds to many city residents for the first time, they’ll also help modernize city monitoring and maintenance of existing electrical infrastructure. The city-owned utility did not respond to inquiries asking about the total number of locations passed by the network expansion to date.
Network Expansion Cost Less Than Originally Anticipated
Consultants had originally projected that the TCL&P citywide fiber build would cost around $28 million for construction, contingencies and the onboarding of new fiber customers. But those estimates have since been scaled significantly downward to around $14 million after the utility renegotiated contracts and sought competitive bids for the remaining work.
The TCL&P expansion project was originally approved to receive a $14.7 million loan by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). But TCL&P’s Chief Financial Officer Karla Myers-Beman recently told the board that using USDA loan funds would present unspecified “compliance and administrative challenges.”
“We’re at a point where it’s just not worth it to pursue the USDA financing for that small a percentage of the project,” TCL&P Executive Director Brandie Ekren told Govtech.
So instead, utility officials are looking to finalize an interfund loan of up to $1 million from the city’s Economic Development Fund that’s to be paid back over a ten-year period.
The project’s original funding plan included the USDA loan, plus $13.5 million in municipal bonding approved by the City Commission in June 2023. Now the city’s plan is to lean exclusively on the $13.5 million in municipal bonding in addition to the $1 million interfund loan.
The current financial plan includes a 10-percent contingency allowance. If that’s exceeded – or more customers than expected sign up for service – the utility indicates more funding may be required. But ideally, if the city-owned utility’s project goes as planned, most locals should have access to next-generation affordable fiber (many for the first time) sometime early next year.
Despite the fact that the overall network’s build has dropped from $28 to $14 million, regional telecom monopolies have seeded misleading editorials in local papers through covertly-funded nonprofit “free market” think tanks, falsely claiming the project’s cost has “ballooned to $14 million” while misrepresenting Charter broadband affordability.
Such groups, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, profess to be looking out for taxpayers, yet never mention that regional monopolies like Charter are routinely slathered in billions in taxpayer dollars for affordable next-generation broadband network access that routinely fails to materialize in communities like Traverse City.
Telecom giants know that community-owned broadband networks aren’t just immensely popular, but money from the local community spent on broadband subscription fees are fed back into the local community, instead of being shipped to an apathetic corporate giant in another state.
City-owned utilities like TCL&P aren’t just improving local affordability and access, they pose an existential threat to a long-dysfunctional market status quo coddled and protected by local, state, and federal lawmakers.
For more detail, ILSR’s Christopher Mitchell spoke with TCL&P’s Chief Technology and Information Officer about the challenges of network deployment last year in Episode 583 of our Community Broadband Bits Podcast. TCL&P also maintains a project deployment map on their website highlighting finished and looming neighborhood construction targets.