California Public Utilities Commission approves $5M grant for fiber network

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved a $5 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to the Central Coast Broadband Consortium (CCBC).  The grant pays for 10% of the cost of a $50 million fiber optic trunk line network planned for Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties on California’s central coast (for more details, click here).

According to Steve Blum of Tellus Venture Associates, the  project will build “a 428-mile fiber optic backbone linking unserved and underserved areas to better served communities, and connecting the entire region to Tier 1 Internet facilities in Silicon Valley. Using a loop architecture, any point on the network would have two independent paths to any other point, and to the Internet. Current plans are for the system to be operated by a cooperative, which will offer access on a wholesale basis to last-mile Internet service providers and major institutional customers.”