The Van Buren County Fiber Ring project is a direct response to the unmet high-speed Internet needs of the school district and local municipalities in and around Van Buren county. The project area, in southwest Michigan along Lake Michigan, demonstrates a lack of success in attracting commercial investment in broadband infrastructure.

This project expects to deploy a 147-mile network to bring speeds of between 10 Mbps and 1 Gbps to the region’s community anchor institutions. In addition, four of the computer centers to be deployed as part of the $895,000 BTOP Round One Public Computer Center award to Michigan State University will be located in libraries which intend to connect to the Van Buren Fiber Ring project.