Columbus Launches $22M Fiber Expansion Into Four Underserved Neighborhoods — But Advocates Say Affordability Gap Remains

For thousands of Columbus residents living without reliable internet access, a $22 million city contract sounds like a turning point. Whether it actually becomes one depends on a question the contract itself does not answer: what happens when families still cannot afford the bill?

Columbus City Council has approved a major fiber broadband expansion targeting Linden, Franklinton, South Linden, and the Near East Side — four neighborhoods that have long sat at the sharpest edge of the city’s digital divide. The investment represents one of the most significant commitments to Columbus broadband infrastructure in recent memory. But digital equity advocates are already raising alarms that construction alone will not close the gap. They point to projected monthly service costs of $60–$80 that, by their estimates, remain out of reach for roughly 34% of households in the affected zip codes.

The result is a familiar tension in urban infrastructure policy: a genuine public investment that may still leave behind the people it was designed to serve.

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What the $22 Million Will — and Won’t — Do

The approved contract directs funding toward physical fiber deployment across the four target neighborhoods, extending the kind of high-speed, high-reliability internet infrastructure that more affluent Columbus zip codes have had access to for years. Fiber connections offer significant advantages over legacy cable or DSL service, including faster upload speeds, greater reliability during peak hours, and lower long-term maintenance costs.

For residents who currently rely on mobile hotspots, slow DSL lines, or no home connection at all, the arrival of fiber infrastructure is a meaningful step forward. Construction timelines have not been publicly finalized, but the approved contract signals that physical buildout is now a funded priority rather than a planning aspiration.

What the contract does not include, at least as currently structured, is a binding affordability mechanism — no subsidized service tier, no income-based pricing requirement, and no dedicated fund to help low-income households cover monthly costs once the cables are in the ground.

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The Affordability Problem Is Not a Side Issue

Digital equity advocates have been consistent on this point: infrastructure without affordability is incomplete infrastructure.

The $60–$80 monthly price range projected for service in the expansion zones is not unusual by national standards. But in neighborhoods like Linden and the Near East Side — where median household incomes and poverty rates reflect decades of disinvestment — that price point is prohibitive for a substantial share of residents. Advocacy organizations tracking the expansion estimate that approximately 34% of households in the targeted zip codes fall below the income threshold at which that cost range becomes manageable without outside assistance.

“Fiber in the ground is not the same as internet access,” said one community organizer working in Linden. “If the price is still $70 a month and your household is bringing in $1,800 a month, you’re doing the same math you were doing before the expansion. The wire doesn’t change that.”

That framing — fiber as necessary but not sufficient — is increasingly central to how digital equity advocates evaluate municipal broadband investments nationwide. In their view, meaningful internet access requires both the physical network and a pricing structure that working-class and low-income households can realistically sustain over time.

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What Subsidy Options Exist — and Where They Fall Short

The federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which provided eligible low-income households with monthly discounts on broadband service, ended in June 2024 after Congress declined to authorize additional funding. No confirmed federal successor program is currently in place, leaving a significant gap in the subsidy landscape that cities like Columbus cannot easily fill on their own.

Some advocates are pushing the city to negotiate a low-income service tier directly into ISP contracts as a condition of receiving public investment. Others are calling for a municipal subsidy fund that could offset costs for qualifying households independent of federal support. Neither approach is part of the approved $22 million framework.

Ohio’s state-level broadband initiatives have directed significant attention toward rural connectivity, where infrastructure gaps are most visible. Urban affordability challenges in cities like Columbus have received comparatively less targeted policy attention — even as data consistently shows that low-income urban households face some of the highest rates of internet non-adoption in the state.

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The Neighborhoods at the Center of This Debate

Linden, Franklinton, South Linden, and the Near East Side share a common history of underinvestment in public infrastructure. All four have active community organizations that have spent years documenting the consequences of the digital divide: students without reliable connections for schoolwork, adults unable to access telehealth services, and small business owners cut off from e-commerce and digital payment systems.

For those communities, the fiber expansion represents hard-won recognition that Columbus’s broadband gaps are a policy problem worth public dollars. The concern now is that the investment stops at recognition rather than resolution.

Residents and advocates across all four neighborhoods have indicated they will continue pressing the city and the contracted ISP for concrete affordability commitments throughout the buildout process.

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A Real Investment That Demands a Complete Answer

The $22 million fiber expansion is not a symbolic gesture. It is a substantial public commitment to neighborhoods that have waited too long for the kind of internet infrastructure that supports economic mobility, educational opportunity, and civic participation. That commitment deserves full credit.

But the measure of this investment will ultimately be determined by the households it reaches — not the miles of fiber it lays. If a third of residents in Linden, Franklinton, South Linden, and the Near East Side remain priced out of service after construction is complete, the expansion will have built the road without unlocking the door.

Columbus policymakers still have time to address the affordability gap before it becomes a permanent feature of this project. The question is whether the political will that approved $22 million for infrastructure can extend to the harder, less visible work of ensuring that infrastructure actually gets used.