How to Find Out If a House Up North Will Ever Get Fiber
Michigan signed the first 17 of its federal broadband construction contracts in late August, and the state says the digging on those projects starts right about now. That sounds like a headline for engineers. It's a headline for anyone shopping a cottage between Cedar and Northport, because the same paperwork also decided which addresses up here get fiber and which ones get a satellite dish and a handshake.
Labor Day traffic on M-22 is gone, the wineries are into harvest, and the fall buyers are showing up. A lot of them plan to work from the house at least part of the week. So this is the month to talk about internet, which is the one utility that shows up on almost no listing sheet and gets asked about on almost every showing.
Where the fiber already is
Leelanau County spent $5 million of its federal relief money on a deal with Point Broadband, and Point put in about $12.4 million of its own, to string fiber through nine townships with roughly 3,100 unserved homes and businesses. Cherryland Electric let them hang it on the co-op poles. The first customer got lit in August 2023, the 1,000th in August 2024, and by that second summer they were hooking up around 100 addresses a week.
The four townships that deal didn't fully cover are Empire, Glen Arbor, Kasson, and Cleveland. Spectrum picked up a chunk of those with a separate federal program (a little over 660 homes as of the county's fall 2024 update), and Cherry Capital Connection is supposed to be filling in the rest. If you're looking around Glen Arbor or out past Maple City, that patchwork is the reason one road has gig service and the next one over has a Verizon hotspot taped to a window.
Benzie went a different route. The county put in $1.5 million, Cherry Capital Connection got a $2.86 million state ROBIN grant in June 2023, and the combined project runs about 230 route miles past roughly 5,100 addresses. Benzie also does something I wish every county did: it posts the contractor's monthly progress reports as PDFs on benzieco.gov (the last one I found is titled "Benzie Update 4-18-2025"). The pricing sheet in that file lists $60 for 250 up and down and $80 for a gig. If you're pricing a place near Frankfort or Honor, that's the number to compare against whatever the seller is paying now.
Antrim, Kalkaska, and the eastern edge of Grand Traverse mostly run on Truestream, the fiber arm of Great Lakes Energy. Their January 2025 fact sheet claimed 28,700 members connected across their territory. Great Lakes Energy is also on the state's list of BEAD winners, so more of the Antrim and Kalkaska backroads should be coming.
Traverse City proper and the built-up parts of Garfield, East Bay, and Elmwood are a different conversation. Cable has been there for decades and fiber overbuilds are creeping through the subdivisions. In town you can get service. You just have to pick which of three providers you want to argue with.
Fiber, or a dish
Michigan's final BEAD plan, approved in December 2025, covers 197,964 addresses statewide. About 85.6 percent of them get fiber. About 12.4 percent, which is 24,638 locations, were assigned to low-earth-orbit satellite, meaning Starlink or Amazon's Leo service. Another 1.4 percent got fixed wireless. Those satellite addresses are, by definition, the ones every fiber company looked at and decided were too expensive to reach even with a federal subsidy. In this region that means the end of the long two-track, the cottage at the bottom of the bluff, the place with a half-mile driveway through the hardwoods.
I have not pulled the county-by-county spreadsheet apart yet (the state publishes one called BEAD_FP_County_Data_12172025.xlsx on the MIHI site if you want to try), so I can't tell you how many of those 24,638 are in Leelanau versus Kalkaska. But some of them are here. And a satellite award is not a temporary thing. The contracts for those addresses run through 2040.
Starlink works. Plenty of people up here use it and are fine. But the Maine broadband office, which handed out thousands of kits before BEAD, found the basic dish needs about 110 degrees of open sky to hold a connection all day. Stand in the yard of a cottage on a north-facing slope under 80-foot maples in Kasson Township and look up. Then decide if you want your paycheck riding on that view.
Snow load on the dish is a real thing too. Ask anyone who has climbed a ladder in February to knock it clean.
How to check an address
None of this requires a phone call to a sales line. It takes about ten minutes.
Start with the FCC National Broadband Map at broadbandmap.fcc.gov. Type the address, not the town. It lists every provider claiming to serve that exact location and the speed they claim. Providers overstate, so treat it as a ceiling, but if the only thing listed is satellite and a DSL line from the old phone company, you have your answer.
Then check the provider's own tool. Point Broadband has an address checker on its shop page. Truestream has a construction status map. Cherry Capital Connection has a portal at cccfiber.com. These are more honest than the FCC map because the company loses money if it says yes and can't deliver.
Then ask the seller for a bill. Not "what internet do you have," because the answer will be "it's fine." Ask for the last statement and a speed test screenshot. The bill tells you the provider and the plan. The speed test tells you what the plan delivers at 7 p.m. on a Saturday in July when every rental on the lake is streaming.
And ask where the drop comes in. On a lot of older Leelanau cottages the fiber was strung to the pole at the road in 2024 and never brought to the house, because the owner was a summer person who didn't bother. That last few hundred feet is sometimes free while the crews are still in the neighborhood and sometimes a real bill a year later, and I don't know the rule that decides which one you get. Call and ask before you close, not after.
What it does to the price
I'm not going to give you a number, because I don't have one I trust. What I can say from working this market is that the houses that sit are the ones where the buyer can't get a straight answer. A cottage with a Point bill in the drawer and a 900-down speed test is a house a remote worker can buy without a plan B. A cottage on a satellite address is a house that needs a specific kind of buyer, and that buyer wants a discount for the uncertainty even if the service turns out to be fine.
If you're selling, get the fiber pulled to the house before you list. Put the provider and plan in the listing remarks. It costs less than a weekend of staging and it answers the question every second showing is going to ask.
If you're buying a place you plan to rent, the same logic applies twice over. Guests review the wifi before they review the view, and the township rules on short-term rentals are already enough to keep track of without adding a connectivity problem on top.
The state's construction window for the fiber awards is four years from the contract date, so the addresses that were promised fiber should have it by late 2030 at the outside, and a lot sooner in the townships where the poles are already strung. The satellite addresses aren't in that queue at all. If you're looking at one, the house has already been sorted, on paper, into the pile that isn't getting fiber, and the price should reflect that.
Happy to look up any address with you. It takes ten minutes and it's a better use of a showing than arguing about the countertops.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
