Nine hundred forty households and 72 businesses in Northern St. Tammany Parish now have access to gigabit high-speed internet, following completion of a broadband expansion delivered through Spectrum under the ConnectLA GUMBO 1.0 program. Parish President Mike Cooper, Councilman Larry Rolling and Director of Technology Grant Black attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the project alongside state officials, according to a St. Tammany Parish Facebook post published Tuesday evening.
The parish government, in a post on St. Tammany Parish's Facebook page, called it a historic day of connectivity for residents who have long gone without reliable broadband. The project was carried out under GUMBO, which stands for Granting Unserved Municipalities Broadband Opportunities and aims to close the digital divide by connecting previously unserved and underserved Louisiana communities with reliable, high-speed broadband, per the same post.
The GUMBO funding behind this kind of work is substantial. Spectrum was awarded a $6.9 million GUMBO grant to bring gigabit internet access to more than 1,350 homes and small businesses in St. Tammany Parish, according to corporate.charter.com. Spectrum also committed $3.39 million of its own money to extend its broadband network in the area, bringing total investment in the project to almost $10.3 million, the company said.
A Bigger Regional Buildout
The Northern St. Tammany work fits into a wider rollout across the region. Spectrum separately announced the launch of Spectrum Internet, Mobile, TV and Voice services to more than 4,000 homes and small businesses across Washington, Tangipahoa, and St. Tammany parishes, though that announcement did not break out how many of those locations fall within St. Tammany alone, per corporate.charter.com. The company described the newly built fiber-optic network as part of its broader RDOF and GUMBO grant-related investments in unserved rural communities.
Spectrum Internet in these buildouts delivers speeds up to 1 Gbps, with starting residential and small-business speeds of 300 Mbps, the company said. The state's GUMBO program itself traces back to 2022, when then-Gov. John Bel Edwards announced a $130 million investment funded through the American Rescue Plan intended to provide internet access to as many as 66,000 rural residents statewide, according to nola.com.
Other St. Tammany Projects Underway
Northern St. Tammany is not the only part of the parish getting fiber upgrades. A separate $3 million infrastructure investment is expected to bring high-speed internet access to nearly 1,000 rural homes between Covington and Folsom, according to the St. Tammany Parish government. The first phase of that expansion is planned to provide fiber infrastructure for 883 homes south of Folsom along LA 25, which currently have limited internet access.
That Covington-to-Folsom project is funded with $2 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act money and $1 million from AT&T, which the parish identified as the contractor. It is a distinct effort from the Spectrum-delivered ConnectLA GUMBO 1.0 work recognized at Tuesday's ribbon-cutting, underscoring how many separate broadband pushes are underway across the parish at once.
How It Compares Statewide
Louisiana expects broadband construction for nearly 15,000 serviceable locations across 23 parishes to be complete by the end of the first quarter of 2027, with nearly 1,800 miles of fiber being deployed statewide, according to the Louisiana Office of Broadband Development and Connectivity cited by benton.org. Similar completed projects elsewhere in the state illustrate the scale of the effort: a finished buildout in Rapides Parish connected 865 households and 68 businesses, while a project in Sabine Parish brought connectivity to more than 3,000 homes and businesses, per the same source.
For the hundreds of Northern St. Tammany families and business owners who gained access this week, the numbers are more personal than statewide totals. The 940 households and 72 businesses now connected represent one more piece of a years-long statewide push to close Louisiana's rural digital divide, one parish-by-parish grant at a time.
