Carver County Broadband Fiber Network

CarverLink, an entity of the Carver County Public Services Division, is a publicly owned broadband fiber optics network installed in Carver County, MN that became operational in the fall of 2013.  The approximately $8 million one-time construction costs for the CarverLink Network, which during construction was known as the Carver County Open Fiber Initiative (C.C.O.F.I), were 80% funded through an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (A.R.R.A.) Federal Grant with the remaining 20% contributed by Carver County.

The CarverLink Network originally consisted of approximately 89 miles of base ring fiber with 33 miles of lateral fiber and has both diversity and redundancy in its electronics and physical plant architecture.  Since inception the CarverLink Network has been expanding both transport capacity as well as physical infrastructure miles and as of 2021 has transport capacity of approximately 300 plus miles throughout Carver County and surrounding local area.

CarverLink directly provides services to public entities and several community support organizations within Carver County including the county, cities, schools, college, townships, housing, transit and primary hospitals and medical clinics.  CarverLink provides these entities with “dark” fiber and/or “lit” fiber services in the form of Internet.

In the private sector, the CarverLink fiber network provides the opportunity for the initial service provider in our network, MetroNet (formerly Jaguar Communications), to provide services to businesses and residents of Carver County.  CarverLink also oversees the availability of dark fiber within our fiber network, which is available to qualified service providers or other entities using dark fiber for new opportunities (open access/open interconnect fiber).