Highway 101 Fiber Project Advances in Sonoma County

(TNS) — Motorists traveling up and down Highway 101 between Santa Rosa and Cloverdale may have noticed orange and blue cable ends sticking out of the ground along the side of the roadway.

The colorful cables are signs of a fiber optic project underway, one of several as Sonoma County advances its goal to expand the region’s broadband connectivity as part of a statewide effort.

The Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative says it will help create an open-access network to bring high-speed broadband service to unserved and underserved communities, using infrastructure consisting of high-capacity fiber optic lines that can carry large amounts of data at high speeds over long distances.

There are a number of fiber optic residential and business Internet service providers in Sonoma County. The county’s efforts to leverage existing fiber optic infrastructure and expand wireless and broadband service is being managed through the Golden State Connect Authority, which it joined in 2021, consistent with the Five-Year Strategic Plan.

The Highway 101 project is under the oversight of Caltrans, according to District 4 spokesperson Jeffrey Weiss. He said the work is being done using federal funds under state oversight, with $150 million total spent so far to fill connectivity gaps across the county.

Weiss said the fiber optic infrastructure work underway on Highway 101 running from Santa Rosa’s Airport Boulevard to Cloverdale is managed under a contract with Arcadian Infracom.

FiberTel LLC is handling the construction work, which entails trenching or jacking fiber conduits into the ground.

“The goal was to have it complete by the end of the year, 2026,” Weiss said. “It’s a very ambitious project. The section between Windsor and Cloverdale is about 95 percent complete.”

The Sonoma County Economic Development Board is pursuing its own work to improve the mixed levels of connectivity in the county, according to the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map. One effort under the agreement was for Golden State Connect Authority to be responsible for delivering rural broadband with rights to install and maintain infrastructure on county-owned property, including the public right-of-way. In a late Monday conversation, it was learned that agreement did not come to fruition.

Jack Kampmann, special projects coordinator at the Economic Development Collaborative, said “while we don’t work directly with Internet service providers on their specific infrastructure projects, there are several upcoming deployments through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program.”

Kampmann said broadband providers Comcast and AT&T were awarded certain stretches along Sonoma County’s Highway 101 corridor, stretching from the Marin-Sonoma border north to Healdsburg.

Outside of this work, Kampmann said that WiConduit is placing broadband infrastructure using the Federal Funding Account along Highway 116, while Frontier Internet is placing infrastructure on Highway 1 under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund — a program administered by the Federal Communications Commission to expand broadband infrastructure in underserved rural areas.

Weiss said the COVID-19 pandemic was the “catalyst” for governments recognizing the need for improving Internet access in many communities, as many people transitioned to remote work.

“During COVID, the government found that many people had to work from home but couldn’t engage because of poor or absent connectivity,” Weiss said. “The governor wanted to solve that by getting the whole state connected. That meant filling in the voids and reaching out to people who were not recipients.”

Weiss said some areas of Sonoma County are more difficult to service than others. When Caltrans began building a bypass at Gleason Beach, called the Gleason Beach Roadway Realignment Project on Highway 1, work teams noticed spotty service, which is common in remote coastal areas, he said.

“It makes our jobs more difficult when it’s along the rural coast,” Weiss said. “That’s one of the problems we will want to solve. It’s just getting the capacity. In some places we’re working, we’re just connecting one spot to another. On Highway 101, you may have spots where we have adequate facilities, and then we will connect those to spots with less powerful facilities.”

Caltrans is working closely with the California Department of Technology on these projects, Weiss said.

Californians can keep an eye on the progress of the Middle Mile Broadband work using the state’s interactive network map.

© 2026 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.). Visit www.pressdemocrat.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.