The Cabot Lore Repository

Cabot, Arkansas

The Cabot Lore Repository

A narrative topic page compiled from council records, the Arkansas Leader, and the other sources listed at the bottom of the page. Resident discussion from Facebook groups is paraphrased into themes; no posts are quoted.

The City That Built Its Own Internet: Cabot's Fiber Network and Connect2First

The story

Most cities treat internet service as something that happens to them. Cabot decided to own it. In August 2021, in the same low-turnout special election that launched the city's modern building boom, voters authorized the city to borrow up to $23.83 million to build a fiber-optic broadband network in the public rights-of-way — infrastructure the city would own as a public utility and lease to a private operator. The partner the city chose, after a competitive selection, was Connect2First, the broadband subsidiary of First Electric Cooperative. Three numbers attach to the project and should not be merged: the ballot authorized maximums up to $23,830,000 (Ordinance No. 12 of 2021); the city's own program estimate was $22 million (Leader, Jan. 5, 2022); and the city and its vendors later described the build itself as a $20 million project (DZS/Connect2First announcements, March 2024). Of every item in the 2021 package, fiber was the one residents argued for with the least prompting — because it answered a grievance nearly every household in town already had.

The grievance came first (before 2021). Cabot's incumbent cable provider was Suddenlink, later rebranded Optimum. The group's memory of that era, preserved in threads from 2021–2023, is detailed and bitter: bills that crept upward ($69.50 to $89.50 for internet alone, in one resident's account), measured speeds far below the advertised plan (one commenter posted 21 Mbps down and 0.2 Mbps up on a "fastest" 150 Mbps plan), a $69 fee to send a technician to diagnose the company's own problem, and cancellation ordeals that routinely ran the better part of an hour — followed, once a customer actually cancelled, by callback offers of free months and deep discounts that were never available to loyal customers. A May 14, 2021 Cabot Strong post consisting essentially of "I hate Suddenlink" drew 156 reactions and 83 comments. A December 2021 thread tracked a round of bill increases. A September 16, 2021 thread — 141 comments — was already comparing Suddenlink with Connect2First, which at that point served areas outside the city limits but not the city itself. The demand side of the 2021 bond vote, in other words, was not abstract: it was a decade of cable bills.

The legal door had to open first. Arkansas law long barred municipalities from offering broadband in competition with private providers. The framework the city ultimately used — A.C.A. § 23-17-409 — required the city to partner, contract, or otherwise affiliate with a private entity rather than sell service itself, and the city had commissioned a broadband feasibility study before the vote (council records, July 2021). Trade-press coverage later reported a DZS executive's account that Mayor Ken Kincade was instrumental in achieving the change in state law that made municipal networks possible (Telecompetitor, March 29, 2024) — a vendor's characterization, presented here as such. The ballot promise, as the Leader summarized it on Aug. 4, 2021, was specific: the city would build broadband infrastructure for the entire city and lay fiber lines in the rights-of-way, lease the lines to another entity and earn revenue, and residents would get higher speeds and better service at a lower rate.

Choosing the partner (February–March 2022). The city ran a selection process in which three firms figured — Connect2First, Ritter Communications, and Comcast. A selection group recommended Connect2First; the council approved the recommendation in Resolution No. 4 of 2022 and, in February 2022, authorized the mayor to begin negotiations. Ordinance No. 8 of 2022 (published in the Leader, March 16, 2022) authorized the affiliation agreement, finding that a city fiber network was of direct benefit to residents' health, safety, and welfare. The structure that resulted, as the Leader reported the terms (Nov. 15, 2023): the city builds and owns the network in its rights-of-way and leases the lines to Connect2First for 30 years, at an initial $35 per subscriber per month, with the per-subscriber rate adjusted every two years. Connect2First sells the retail service — symmetrical plans at 200 Mbps, 500 Mbps, and 1 gig, unlimited data, no contract — under its own name.

The build-out (2022–2024). The city and First Electric held a ceremonial groundbreaking on August 15, 2022, at Rolling Hills Country Club, promising 1-gig service throughout the city and noting the lines would be able to accommodate additional internet companies, not only First Electric. The network as built is an XGS-PON system — about 220 miles of fiber, capable of symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps, passing roughly 26,000 residents and businesses (DZS announcement, March 25, 2024). Connections began in early 2023 and the count climbed in the Leader's reporting: 600 residents connected and 150 waiting for home installation as of mid-November 2023; by the Connect2First office ribbon-cutting at the Justice Center on July 11, 2024, the company reported 2,000 customers signed up in Cabot and 24 employees at the office, with fiber installation across the city scheduled to be completed by the end of August 2024 (Leader, July 17, 2024). The office — at 805 W. Main St., inside the $8.5 million Justice Center — houses sign-ups, bill payment, the call center, and the local service team, an arrangement the company and the city both present as the point of the model: when something breaks, the office is in town.

Recognition (November 2023). The City of Cabot and Connect2First jointly won the Plan of the Year Award for population under 30,000 from the Arkansas chapter of the American Planning Association, presented at the chapter's Fayetteville conference in November 2023, for the city's fiber-optic infrastructure plan. The Leader's award coverage is the source of the formulation that has followed the project since: Cabot is the first city in Arkansas to build its own internet infrastructure as a public utility.

The office lease became its own story (September 2024). Connect2First occupied space in the Justice Center before its lease paperwork caught up. On September 16, 2024, the council passed Resolution No. 35 of 2024 authorizing a lease agreement with Connect2First Internet, LLC at 805 W. Main St. As the Leader reported the terms then — and restated them in its Oct. 28, 2026 survey of city properties — rent is $11,000 a month, and Connect2First is to pay back rent at $6,500 per month until the back rent is paid in full; the 2026 account describes the arrangement as a 25-year agreement for the office space. Neither account states the total amount of back rent owed or when the repayment schedule ends.

Where it stands (2025–2026). Company-wide, Connect2First reported 34,000 customers connected and 6,000 miles of fiber installed across its Arkansas footprint by the fall of 2025 (Leader, Oct. 29, 2025) — a system figure, not a Cabot one; no Cabot-specific subscriber count appears in the sources reviewed after July 2024's 2,000. Third-party availability trackers working from FCC broadband data (as of December 2025) estimate Connect2First fiber is available to roughly 98 percent of Cabot addresses — availability, not subscriptions. What changed by 2026 is the market around the city network: RightFiber built in Cabot, Xfinity and Brightspeed (successor to the Quantum Fiber/CenturyLink plant) sell fiber service, and wireless carriers market home internet in the groups. The monopoly the 2021 vote set out to break is gone; the argument in the groups now is over whose service actually works (see below).

What critics said

The fiber project drew a different quality of criticism from the rest of the 2021 package: residents criticized its pace and, later, its performance far more than its existence. In the 2021 bond debate itself, internet was the package's most praised item — breaking the incumbent cable provider's monopoly was a live grievance, and the fiber question drew the warmest support in the July 16, 2021 bond-meeting thread (see What the Bond Money Built). The friction since has been operational:

The Facebook discourse

The fiber conversation in Cabot's groups is really three conversations in sequence, and the sequence is the story.

First, the Suddenlink years (2021–2023). The groups functioned as a complaint bureau for the incumbent: outage roll-calls ("anyone else's Suddenlink not working?"), bill-increase tracking, and detailed accounts of the cancellation gauntlet — the hour-long call, the $40 charge after cancelling, and then the win-back callback offering four free months and $40 a month, which residents relayed to each other as a negotiating tactic. The emotional register peaked early — the May 2021 "I hate Suddenlink" post (156 reactions, 83 comments) predates the bond vote by three months — and the September 2021 comparison thread (141 comments) shows residents actively benchmarking the co-op's out-of-town service against the incumbent before the city's network existed. When a resident cancelled Suddenlink in February 2023 because their fiber had been connected, the thread (83 reactions, 72 comments) became a how-to: the retention offers documented in real time ($86 a month for 150 Mbps, dropped to $70, then $60 with three free months, once cancellation was real), posted upload speeds of 0.2 Mbps on the incumbent's fastest plan, and at least one commenter naming the moral plainly — the importance of market competition.

Second, the honeymoon and the service legend (2023–2024). Early-adopter threads are report-backs: speeds posted, install experiences compared, prices reported ($64 a month in one much-liked comment). The defining artifact is a July 25, 2024 post (205 reactions — among the largest responses to any service post found): the poster's fiber line was cut by a landscaping crew at noon and Connect2First had repaired it within about ninety minutes, a turnaround the poster contrasted with an expectation of months under the old providers. Praise in this period attaches less to speed than to locality — technicians who come out, an office in town, a company whose parent cooperative residents already knew from their electric bills.

Third, the mature market (2025–2026). By 2026 the discourse treats Connect2First as an incumbent, with an incumbent's complaint profile: outage threads, equipment and app confusion (a May 2026 thread on the Plume app and missing pods), smart-device incompatibilities, and a June 17, 2026 thread (109 comments) in which a customer with seventeen days of daily resets asked about switching to Optimum — and was met with a genuinely mixed record: neighbors defending Connect2First and blaming equipment, neighbors reporting the same problems, and a visible minority who had already left for T-Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T fixed wireless, which carrier store staff now market directly in the groups (a February 2026 post from the Cabot Verizon store manager pitched home internet explicitly against Connect2First's prices). The grievance has not disappeared; it has been redistributed among five or six providers. BCOC, notably, contributed almost nothing to this topic across searches — the internet argument lives in Cabot Strong, the group whose threads carried the 2021 bond debate.

What the record shows

Connected threads

Sources