REGIONAL — If you’ve driven Highway 169 or any stretch of road along Lake Vermilion’s south shore lately, you’ve probably seen them. Crews in hard hats hauling cable, guiding machines, and digging along the ditches. To many locals, it’s sparked a familiar question:
Didn’t we do this already?
The answer is yes and no.
Roughly a decade ago, the Northeast Service Cooperative strung a massive web of fiber across northeastern Minnesota. But what you’re seeing today isn’t a duplication of that work. It’s the follow-through. Thanks to a partnership between NESC, the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa and the broadband company CTC, more than 2,000 homes and businesses around Lake Vermilion’s south shore, Pelican Lake, and Nett Lake are finally getting high-speed broadband service.
Joe Buttweiler, chief strategy officer for CTC, compared the system to a freeway.
“What NESC built is the freeway system, and that freeway system provides on and off ramps to it in Tower, in International Falls, Mt. Iron, Virginia,” he said. “Only at those larger towns and cities on the Iron Range is where you can get on and off the NESC freeway.”
“So now we’re building from those points,” Buttweiler continued. “From Tower, where we’re accessing the NESC fiber, we’re building the south shore of Lake Vermilion. But just like a freeway system, we can’t just tap into that NESC fiber at every county road or every home along the road.”
The middle mile
NESC’s “freeway” network was completed in 2015 after four years of construction and $43.5 million in federal investment. The goal wasn’t to wire every house. It was to build a middle mile, essential infrastructure that future projects could plug into.
Joe Weber, divisional director for the NESC middle mile system, said the project was originally built to serve schools, libraries, governments, and other public entities in places where private providers couldn’t justify the cost of running fiber.
“They built a network, and it was to provide broadband to underserved and unserved areas of northeastern Minnesota,” Weber said. “The purpose was kind of connecting some of the critical service sites and building a robust fiber optic network that can be utilized by last mile providers such as CTC.”
The original network spanned eight counties and connected about 320 public facilities. Since then, it has grown to over 1,300 miles of fiber stretching from Cambridge to Grand Portage.
Public meets private
The Bois Forte–CTC project wouldn’t have been feasible without the NESC backbone. Without it, CTC would have faced the enormous expense of building long stretches of new fiber just to link the project area to the larger internet. By tapping into NESC’s existing system, those costs were avoided.
“We’re using that NESC fiber to get between areas,” Buttweiler said. “That alone saves millions of dollars in cost and made our grant application more competitive.”
NESC, which is a nonprofit, leases fiber to providers like CTC under long-term agreements.
“Typically, through agreements we lease or have a long-term IRU (Indefeasible right of use) where they have rights to use our fiber optic cable in specific regions,” Weber said. “We also provide lit fiber connections if they want a set speed like 10 gig. But if they want dark fiber, they can run whatever capacity they want based on their own equipment.”
Numerous other broadband providers lease from NESC including, for example, Arvig, Midco, and Arrowhead Electric Cooperative.
Still future-ready
A common question that’s cropped up in recent months is whether a network built in 2011 to 2015 can keep up with the skyrocketing internet demands of 2025 and beyond. Both Weber and Buttweiler say that’s not a concern with fiber optics.
“The fiber itself has not changed at all,” Weber said. “The same investment 12 or 13 years ago is still working with new technology.”
Weber explained that modern fiber strands can carry dozens of light wavelengths simultaneously. Only two strands of fiber might be used to carry as many as 40 different channels of data.
Buttweiler emphasized that upgrading service is largely a matter of changing the equipment at each end of the fiber.
“This project will be capable of up to 10 gigabit symmetrical internet,” he said. “As technology advances, we change out the optics in cabinets and the ONT (optical network terminal) in homes, and we can provide a higher service.”
What’s happening now
While the backbone was already there, CTC still had to build all the local connections, the main fiber lines that tap into the NESC network and drop lines that run from those to individual homes and businesses. That’s what the crews are doing now.
Each of those connections requires meticulous splicing work, where fiber cables are joined together strand by strand. At intersections, multiple lines must be tied into the network, and at the end of each driveway, the drop cable has to be spliced into place. Tens of thousands of these splices are being made across the project area, Buttweiler said, a painstaking but essential part of bringing fiber service directly to residents.
CTC broke the project into three zones, each with a different general contractor. The Orr and Pelican Lake area is furthest along, with the mainline complete and drop installation underway. The Tower area is about 75 percent complete and is expected to be finished this fall. The western Vermilion zone is roughly halfway done, and with winter approaching, final work there is likely to continue into next spring.
Why it matters
To many locals, especially those who’ve struggled with unreliable DSL, sluggish satellite service, or no connection at all, this buildout couldn’t come fast enough.
“When you go from being in an unserved area, having nothing, to having something, it is like incredible,” Buttweiler said.
The benefits go beyond streaming shows or scrolling TikTok.
“It’s been good for the area,” Weber said. “The high-speed internet with all the remote work and just the way things are going these days, it’s just needed.”
The network also adds resiliency for institutions and businesses that need uptime guarantees.
“A critical service might have two separate providers, two lines into it,” Weber said. “And in the case of an outage, one line goes down, the other is still active.”
Policy clouds the future
While this project is moving forward, future fiber optic efforts might face headwinds from changing federal policies under the Trump administration. The new BEAD funding guidelines require technology neutrality, putting satellite providers on equal footing with fiber when applying for broadband grants.
“There is a place for low Earth satellite internet,” Buttweiler said. “But many locations could be served with fiber optic that is scalable and will last for decades to come, and probably at a significantly lower cost to the consumer.”
For now, though, fiber is rolling forward, one trench, one driveway, and one splice at a time.

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