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Municipal fiber / carrier hotel / municipal broadband test · Regional carriers
Lead: The town runs municipal utilities. It does not — on any record found — run a municipal broadband network, a municipal fiber ring, or a carrier hotel. The negative is printed with its instruments, and what the record holds instead is printed at its true, and still interesting, size.
The test: searches of the Town of New Carlisle's own published record (town site and codified ordinances), county proceedings, and provider/FCC-coverage reporting for a town-owned fiber ring, municipal broadband utility, or carrier hotel at New Carlisle returned no such system. One search result that appears to describe a town-council fiber-ring vote is, on opening, a Citizen Portal summary for the Town of Newburgh in Warrick County — a different town — and was discarded; it is mentioned here only so the next digger does not cite it. What the town's record does hold is a municipal water utility of regional consequence: the town operates the water plants serving the IEC country (the converted St. Joseph Energy Center plant and the Cliffs plant in the county agreements), under a county–town water-service settlement approved in its amended form in January 2026, with a combined withdrawal cap of 24 million gallons per day, an exclusive town water-service territory with a four-mile buffer confirmed through the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission proceeding, and a roughly $114 million county–Amazon Data Services water-and-sewer infrastructure agreement (about $62.7 million water, $51.3 million sewer, approved August 6, 2024) under which completed water infrastructure transfers to the town for long-term operation. A town of 1,891 as the water utility for an $11 billion data-center campus is the true municipal-network story here — water, not fiber.
Regional fiber, at documented size: residential and business service in the town is commercial. Current provider reporting (FCC Broadband Data Collection as reflected in 2026 coverage summaries, and carrier availability pages) lists AT&T Fiber (to 5 Gbps where available), Frontier Fiber (to 7 Gbps advertised, select areas), SURF Internet fiber (47.28% availability in one FCC-based summary), plus Xfinity cable, Mediacom, and fixed-wireless and satellite carriers — figures that conflict between aggregators (one older summary reports 0% fiber availability) and are therefore printed as carrier claims with their conflict visible, not as a town statistic. At campus scale, the AWS build is itself a fiber consumer of the first order — AWS's announced workforce programs for the area include its Fiber Optic Fusion Splicing Workshop — but the campus network is Amazon's private infrastructure, not a municipal system, and no public record read describes a town carrier hotel or public dark-fiber offering. Close: municipal broadband — negative, instruments named; municipal water as technology infrastructure — documented and large.
Sources:
- Town of New Carlisle, townofnewcarlisle.in.gov — Drinking Water SRF Preliminary Engineering Report hearing notice, Apr. 16, 2024 (East water treatment plant rehabilitation/expansion); codified fee schedule, Ch. 98 (sewer/water/stormwater rates), via American Legal Publishing code library.
- South Bend Tribune, Jan. 19, 2026 — county–town water-service settlement; town's exclusive service territory and four-mile buffer; IURC intervention (Cause No. 46314 in the amended-agreement summary).
- St. Joseph County proceedings summaries — water agreement, 24 MGD combined cap, town operation of the SJEC and Cliffs plants; ADS water/sewer agreement c. $114M approved Aug. 6, 2024, water assets to transfer to the town.
- Carrier and FCC-based coverage reporting for New Carlisle, IN (AT&T, Frontier availability pages; BestNeighborhood / CompareInternet FCC BDC summaries, 2025–2026) — carrier claims as printed, conflicts noted. The Newburgh, Warrick County, fiber-ring item was identified as a different town and excluded.