High-speed fiber notebook: Bloomington board OKs another ROW use for city-supported project

At its regular Tuesday meeting, Bloomington’s board of public works approved the use of the public right-of-way by Atlantic Engineering Group (AEG) for another chunk of its ongoing work to install a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network for Hoosier Networks.

Hoosier Networks is a company formed by Meridiam, to do business in Indiana. In July of 2022 Bloomington established a “spider” TIF district to support the project.

Hoosier Networks offers high-speed internet service in Bloomington through GigabitNow.

On Tuesday night, it was engineering field specialist Alex Gray who presented the request for right-of-way use to the three-member board. Gray noted that this kind of request from AEG has become somewhat routine over the last year or so.

Three work areas were described in the request approved on Tuesday. One is in the vicinity of North Crescent Road—between West Gray Street to West 17th Street, and Adams Street to Highway 37/I-69.

The second area is in the vicinity of North Pine Street—between West Bloomfield Road to West 9th Street, and South Landmark Avenue to East Elm Street.

The third area is in the vicinity of South Strong Drive—from West Countryside Lane neighborhoods north along South Rockport, and South Rogers Street to neighborhoods at South Patterson Drive and West Grimes Lane.

The freshest information from GigabitNow, provided to The B Square this week, is that about 25 percent of the network build-out is complete, with completion expected in the middle of 2025.

When it’s finished, the network is supposed to include more than 45,000 premises, which will be more than 95 percent of Bloomington.