Internet firms make their pitch

By Kevin O’Brien

Representatives from five different internet service providers (ISPs) presented their plans Monday for providing high-speed internet access to over 8,000 Marathon County residents who are currently stuck with slower connections.

Members of the county’s broadband task force spent about an hour listening to proposals from Frontier Communications, Mosaic Technologies, Bertram Communications, Bug Tussel and Charter Communications, which have all indicated their intent to pursue a portion of the over $1 billion awarded to Wisconsin as part of the federal government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

After some discussion, the task force voted to recommend county endorsements for the proposals from Bertram, Mosaic and Bug Tussel. This does not preclude Charter and Frontier from applying for BEAD grants, but if the endorsements are passed by the county board, it would give the other three ISPs an advantage.

ISPs have until Feb. 25 to apply for Round 1 of BEAD funding through the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, which has been tasked with distributing the federal money in a way that ensures that all residents and businesses that want highspeed internet can get it. For the purposes of accepting bids and awarding the grant money, Marathon County has been divided up into 113 “project units” that encompass all 8,362 addresses that don’t already have reliable access to broadband internet and

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aren’t set to be covered by a previously planned project. The project units appeared as multi-colored clusters across a county map in the task force’s agenda packet, with a heavy concentration stretching from the Athens area down to Stratford and east over to Marathon City.

Each of the ISPs submitting grant applications will have their proposals scored on a 100-point scale, with a minimum of 40 points needed to qualify for funding. Local townships, villages and school districts can boost an ISP’s score by submitting a letter of support, and the county board can provide another seven points by officially endorsing a project.

Supervisor John Robinson, chair of the task force, said the plan is to present its recommended endorsements to the Infrastructure Committee at its Feb. 6 meeting before bringing them to the Executive Committee and the full county board for a vote on Feb. 20. A special meeting of the Western and Eastern Towns Association has also been scheduled for 7 p.m. on Feb. 12 at the town of Marathon town hall for ISPs to make presentations to town officials.

The county has the option of endorsing one or all of the ISPs for each project unit, with the understanding that the PSC will ultimately decide which companies get the money to do projects.

“We will work with everybody and anybody,” Robinson said prior to Monday’s ISP presentations.

One wrinkle in the county’s review process was caused by a federal anti-collusion provision that’s meant to keep competing ISPs from seeing each other’s proposals and adjusting them to their benefit. To prevent this, the task force asked representatives from the other four ISPs to step out of the room while one of them was presenting their proposal.

Wisconsin’s open meetings law would not allow the task force to prohibit anyone from staying in the room, and Robinson said he and corporation counsel Michael Puerner did not feel the conversation warranted a closed session. Nevertheless, the ISPs all agreed to step out during their competitors’ presentations.

The proposals

Three of the five companies that presented proposals at Monday’s meeting have already done broadband projects in the county or are currently working to expand their networks.

Bug Tussel, for example, was recently granted another $8 million conduit loan from the county to complete a 200-mile loop of fiber optic cable and 16 towers throughout the county. The company’s executive director, Scott Feldt, told the task force that it made substantial progress in 2024, and its service has gone live in the Hamburg, Little Chicago and Ringle areas.

“We are serving customers as we speak,” he said, noting that the company plans to have its current project done by the end of this year.

Speaking about its proposed BEAD projects, Feldt said Bug Tussel plans to submit bids for all 113 project units, but he declined to provide design maps at this time because they are likely to change.

Chris Crawford of Charter Communications also updated the task force on a project it is wrapping up this year using money from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. For BEAD, Crawford said Charter intends to bid on projects in a majority of Wisconsin counties, and it is recommending that county boards provide blanket endorsements.

“We don’t have a lot of data to provide at this point,” he said.

Todd Cruze of Frontier Communications, on the other hand, presented a map identifying all of the 3,169 grant-eligible addresses it intends to serve, along with 23 “community anchor institutions” (CAIs), which include schools, hospitals, fire and police departments.

Two smaller companies, Mosaic Technologies out of Cameron and Bertram Communications in Random Lake, also shared their plans for expanding broadband into Marathon County using BEAD money.

Preston Pearson, chief operations officer for Mosaic, said the company is a cooperative that started in northwestern Wisconsin and has expanded into Chippewa and Clark counties along the STH 29 corridor. The company’s BEAD proposal covers “pretty much everything on the west side of Marathon County,” he said, encompassing a little over 4,000 addresses.

Pearson said Mosaic has already engaged with the towns of Johnson, Bern and Spencer and have gotten letters of support from the Athens and Abbotsford school districts. He said the company has been “very aggressive” about applying for grants to expand its services.

Sarah Lawrence of Bertram spoke to the task force about several of the company’s recently completed projects in Oconto, Door, Dodge and Jefferson counties, one of which involved putting up eight towers in the span of just 90 days.

None of the ISPs said they would be seeking any financial assistance from the county, and all of them said they would use buried fiber optic cable to expand broadband to homes and businesses.

Mark Leonard, a representative of the PSC, said the seven points available through a county endorsement, plus the five available for letters of support and community engagement with towns and schools, could determine which ISPs are awarded grants.

“When every point counts, I feel it’s very important,” he said.

PROJECT UNITS - The shaded areas on the map above represent portions of Marathon County that are eligible for highspeed internet expansion through the federal Broadband Expansion, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. Each cluster represents one of 113 “project units” that can be bid on by internet service providers. Areas that are not shaded either already have access to broadband internet or will get it under another project.