Case studies
Real towns. Real networks. Real stories.
Every community we partner with has a story — a reason the big providers never came, and the way its neighbors built something better themselves. Here are a few of them.
Fiber across the sea floor
A 6.5-mile subsea cable to an island of 92 — and 94% signed on before a single home was lit.
Read the storyCranberry IslesStory coming soon
Somerville & WashingtonStory coming soon
Isle au Haut, Maine
We ran fiber across the sea floor.
To connect an island of 92 people, Axiom and the community laid a 6.5-mile fiber cable on the bottom of the ocean. This is how it happened — and why an island said yes almost to a person.
The challenge
An island the grid forgot
Isle au Haut sits six miles out in Penobscot Bay, accessible to most people only by boat — the year-round mail boat runs from Stonington, carrying people, mail, and freight. For an island of fewer than a hundred year-round residents, real broadband had been out of reach for a decade, and the usual fixes were off the table.
Utility poles weren’t an option: the incumbent owned a third of them and the cost to use them was prohibitive. A large wireless antenna wasn’t either: most of the island is Acadia National Park, and a tower would scar the very vistas that make the place what it is. To connect Isle au Haut at all, the fiber would have to go a harder way — along the ground, under it, and across the floor of the ocean.
The build
Six and a half miles, one tide
On November 10, 2024, a crane barge eased out of the harbor carrying a one-inch-thick subsea fiber cable — the same kind of armored cable engineered to survive on the ocean floor. The crew had roughly a half-day weather window to get it down between the island and Stonington on Deer Isle.
“They started at 3:30 in the morning to lay down the cable safely,” recalls broadband committee member Sue Foelix. By the end of that single working tide, 6.5 miles of fiber lay on the bottom of the ocean, and Isle au Haut was tied into the mainland for good.
A do-it-yourself project
What made Isle au Haut remarkable wasn’t just the engineering — it was who did the work. This was a community that refused to wait. Residents hauled the cable with their own truck, hand-dug trenches across the island, and leaned on local knowledge the way islands always have: a local clammer, Guy Parker, used his read of the seabed to help mark the cable’s route across the bay.
It was, in the words of one of the subsea consultants on the project, “probably the shortest cable I will ever lay… a do-it-yourself project.” The expertise was world-class. The hands were the island’s own.
“Like municipal power and the telephone before it, access to high-speed internet is a transformational project for Isle au Haut.”
Mark Ouellette, President & CEO, Axiom
The result
An island said yes — almost to a person
The proof of a community network isn’t the cable. It’s how many neighbors sign on.
94% pre-subscribed
Before a single home was lit, 94% of the island’s residents had already signed up — one of the highest take rates Axiom has ever seen.
Feb 2025 first homes lit
The first residents came online in February 2025, with a community ribbon-cutting that summer drawing nearly a third of the island.
Symmetrical fiber, 1 Gig-ready
Residents now get symmetrical fiber from 50 to 250 Mbps — the kind of connection, as Axiom’s CEO put it, “many people in New York City still want.”
Your town could be the next story
Thirteen Maine communities have partnered with Axiom to build a network of their own. We’d love to talk about yours.