The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“I don’t know the down side”
For Todd Walton’s business in international public relations, the Internet is a lifeline. From his home in the upper Gunnison Valley, he can work with a Durango-based company for clients scattered across the globe.
For Walton and his wife, who also works over the Internet, a reliable web connection is akin to a reliable car for a commuter: if it doesn’t work, they don’t either, since 95 percent of their business is conducted online. But reliability isn’t easy to come by here in the hills.
“It’s not the speed of the connection that is more of a problem than the disruptions in service from time to time,” Walton said. “The biggest problem we face working from home is losing our connection to the Internet.”
And the Waltons aren’t alone in the Gunnison Valley, where more and more young professionals are settling down with a dream of telecommuting to work.
It’s a trend that Jason Swenson, owner of Gunnison-based Internet Colorado, has seen grow in recent years. The result, he says, is larger applications capable of doing more things that slow connection speed and decrease reliability in access to the Internet.
The solution to the speed and reliability problem in the local Internet connection would be improving the infrastructure, and Swenson may have found a way to do just that without a pricey bond measure.
He hopes to install an Advanced Wireless Mesh Network, built on a fiber optic frame, that gives public buildings and businesses the fastest Internet connection available and casts a wireless web across the entire community.
And he hopes to do 80 percent of it with federal stimulus money.
In August, with the help of Swenson and Internet Colorado, the city of Gunnison applied for $1.5 million in grant money from the federal Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) to help fund the installation effort.
“Ours was one of five applications that were commented on by the governor’s office and then sent to the national level out of 80 submittals, so I think Gunnison has a pretty good chance,” Swenson says. “But part of the requirement for applying was that they wanted projects that could be modeled after other communities. Crested Butte is probably the perfect model for this that I can see.”
The city of Gunnison should know by the end of December if its application is accepted. Around the same time, the town of Crested Butte should have decided if it wants to submit an application for funding from the second disbursement cycle in the program. According to Swenson, it only makes sense that Crested Butte officials do just that.
“If we can get the infrastructure here in Gunnison, it won’t be very hard to take it to Crested Butte,” Swenson says. “There are other rural areas of the state where it is economically infeasible to do this, but Crested Butte is ideally situated, and without this federal money, it would be nearly impossible,” he says.
Crested Butte town manager Susan Parker wants to be sure that the system will work in town before she commits to applying for the grant dollars.
“I have some familiarity with mesh networks and you have to map out a plan. Without knowing where you’re going to locate the relays, there is no way of knowing if it will work,” she says. “So until they do the mapping, we don’t know if the signal can reach all parts of the town, and we don’t want dead spots.”
Mapping the town is what Swenson and Greg Maynard, a consultant with Carbondale-based Mitchell and Company that will supply most of the components for the system, are working on now.
Maynard believes that when the mapping is done, it will show that the wireless web is feasible in Crested Butte if the transmitters are placed close enough to one another, eliminating the dead spots Parker was referring to.
However, Maynard said, the transmitters will be attached only to public buildings and utility poles and will have an effective range of between 400 and 600 feet. That may leave some areas of town in the dark.
Widespread access to the system is also a requirement of the grant application. Swenson says, “The grant requires that the minimum bandwidth you put out to any one [land line] subscriber is 768 kilobytes per second, but the design of the network has to have the ability to provide a maximum of 20 megs per second if the client chooses to utilize that.”
If Swenson and Maynard find that the wireless web is feasible, they think it could be a huge improvement over what is currently available to customers like the Waltons.
Todd Walton said that when choosing an Internet provider his choices were limited because “Cable wasn’t an option from the standpoint of speed and interruptions in service.” He also has wireless routers that allow him to work from his computer anywhere in his home. For those reasons, he is the ideal candidate for the service proposed by Swenson.
Swenson estimates Gunnison Valley residents or guests will be able to subscribe to the network for about $18 per month, get a username and password, and access the Internet from any wireless-compatible device anywhere in the valley. Guests to the valley could get the same service for about $5 per day.
The grant funds would also allow Internet Colorado to provide schools, libraries and municipal buildings with free fiber optic Internet access for the first three years. Law enforcement, emergency responders and the Gunnison Valley Health System would also get an enhanced communications system allowing each to communicate on one secure network anywhere in the county without dealing with dropped cell-phone signals.
“We’ll provide service to the public entities at cost after the three-year period is up, because we have to prove sustainability,” Swenson says. “That’s the only way you get this [grant]. If the network can’t sustain itself, then the government won’t support it.”
Even businesses along Gunnison’s Main Street could have a free fiber optic cable run to their business and would have to pay only for the Internet service provided. The same could be considered for businesses along Elk Avenue in Crested Butte if that is the route the town chooses.
Swenson says, “You’re going to find in the next two to three years, your average DSL connection is going to be slower because of the applications that we’re running, and there is no way around that. The more you have, the more you need to use, and you’re going to find that DSL can’t keep up with the demand. Something else has to be done.”
Swenson believes the proposed fiber optic infrastructure will be able to handle most technologies to come in the future. According to Gunnison’s grant proposal, “Business district users will be connected to the network… at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second.”
The wireless signal transmitters, or relays, that are being planned as part of the wireless web in Gunnison will enable a minimum connection speed of 100 megabytes per second. The only variable is the amount of data a subscriber’s computer will be able to process.
“The network is a component of the system; it’s like the highway,” Swenson explains. “The bigger the highway, the faster you can drive on it. How fast you can drive depends on the car that you have, or in this case, the computer that you have.”
He says the proposed network will be state-of-the-art and more robust than the systems in most major cities. He adds that he doesn’t know of any other communities in Colorado that would have a system like the one being proposed.
The technology to upgrade the system to fiber optic cable has existed for some time, but until federal stimulus dollars for BTOP became available through the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), the technology was too expensive to be possible in communities the size of Crested Butte and Gunnison. Gunnison’s project alone will cost about $1.55 million.
But together, the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will be shelling out $7.2 billion to increase the capacity for high-speed Internet service in rural communities. Swenson hopes the model for Gunnison and Crested Butte will serve as a guide to other communities that pursue system upgrades.
Crested Butte mayor Leah Williams is excited about the prospect of a wireless web being cast across the county and what it could mean for the town’s economy.
“I do not know the down side. It is really exciting,” she says. “It would be a huge boon to business if someone can come here and work with the quality of service that we would be able to provide.”
Williams likened the federal funding of telecommunications infrastructure to the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system in the 1950s, and said the effect could be comparable for the local economy.
Swenson estimates that the project could create as many as 75 full-time positions in the county over the next five years. One benefit, he says, that might eclipse the economic impact of installing the infrastructure would be the economic growth that might come from companies looking to hold retreats in a place with a wireless web.
Williams agrees and thinks the town of Crested Butte could be missing out on a golden opportunity if it doesn’t pursue the grant money that is available.
“I don’t know how an upgrade like this would be affordable without the stimulus grants. It would require a bond and because they will have a lot more of the infrastructure in Gunnison, it makes a lot of sense, especially if the federal government can provide the means,” Williams says.
But the Crested Butte Town Council won’t get the chance to pursue the BTOP grant dollars until Parker is convinced that the wireless network will work for everyone in town, and that hasn’t happened yet.
