For towns & communities
Your town. Your network.
Axiom partners with Maine towns to build and operate community-owned fiber networks — the kind that stay, pay for themselves, and answer to your residents instead of a distant shareholder.
The model
Owned by the community, run by experts
The town owns the asset. Axiom designs, builds, and operates it. You get a future-proof network and a local team on the other end of the phone — without becoming a phone company.
The town owns it
The network is a municipal asset — built for your residents, accountable to your town, and yours for the long haul. Not ours to sell out from under you.
100% fiber to the home
Symmetrical fiber engineered to scale as demand grows — the gold standard, built once and built right, with VoIP phone available over the same line.
We run it, in-house
Engineering, field crews, billing, and customer support are all Axiom staff working from Machias — no outsourced call centers, no finger-pointing.
How it works
The Rural Broadband Deployment Kit
No two towns are alike, so we don’t sell one-size-fits-all. Our proven framework follows a clear, repeatable path — then keeps going. A community network is never “finished,” so the last stages loop back to the first.
Axiom’s 7-stage cycle-
1
Assess
Evaluate your community’s needs and determine every leverageable asset — existing poles, conduit, and terrain.
-
2
Define goals
Collaborate with town leadership and citizens to define what the community needs and wants from its network.
-
3
Plan
Develop the strategic and tactical fiber-to-the-home deployment plan tailored to your community.
-
4
Implement
Execute the build — our own field crews construct the fiber network across your town.
-
5
Measure
Monitor, measure, and manage the live network to hold performance and reliability where they belong.
-
6
Evolve
Refine continually based on feedback, monitoring, and community involvement.
-
7
Enhance
An ongoing commitment to deliver innovative solutions and enhancements — then back to assessing what’s next.
Paying for it
You don’t fund this alone
Rural fiber is largely grant-funded — and navigating that landscape is exactly where a town needs a partner who’s done it before. We help identify the programs, assemble the application, and build to their standards. Towns like Somerville and Washington brought fiber to residents for the first time on state and federal grants, with Axiom as their deployment partner.
Funding we help towns pursue
Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) — the state’s broadband agency, coordinating federal and state infrastructure dollars.
Federal infrastructure grants — programs like NTIA’s Broadband Infrastructure Program that funded real Maine builds.
Town & regional matches — we help structure a local contribution that unlocks the larger outside dollars.
Proven in the hardest places
Two decades. Real networks.
We’ve been doing this across Maine’s roughest terrain since 2004 — not pitching it.
An island that owns its fiber
A close-knit island community came together to build and own its own fiber network — the model that's now spreading coast to county.
Grant-funded, built from scratch
Two long-underserved rural towns brought first-ever fiber to residents through state and federal grants, with Axiom constructing the build.
A network lit, street by street
One of our newest municipal partners, now switching on fiber neighborhood by neighborhood as construction wraps.
Let’s talk about your town
Whether you’re a selectboard, a broadband committee, or one determined resident — the first step is a conversation. Tell us about your community and we’ll map the path from here.
Curious where we’ve already built? See our coverage map →