The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“We knew a year ago that
Eagle Net wasn’t coming"
The legacy of federal and state partnerships over the years that brought highways and electricity to rural America won’t be extended to Internet infrastructure anytime soon, at least not where Gunnison County is concerned.
Eagle Net Alliance is the private-public partnership that was funded with $100.6 million in federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grants and an additional more than $30 million in state grants and in-kind contributions. It might have been the best bet at bringing more abundant and reliable Internet service to the valley, but the program has already passed us by.
And yet much remains the same.
“Everybody understands that connectivity and broadband access is the new infrastructure that everybody needs,” Gunnison County Commissioner Phil Chamberland says, adding that for some of the independent business people the valley has attracted, a reliable and substantial Internet connection is requisite. “It’s the difference between Kebler Pass and 1-70 coming into town, in terms of economic development. It’s something we definitely need to work on.”
Eagle Net Alliance was charged with building a statewide high-speed fiber-optic network touted as having the potential to dramatically improve rural broadband service to many communities on the Western Slope and across the state.
Although Eagle Net’s initial proposal included big plans for Gunnison County, by the time the organization actually came to Gunnison the plan had been downgraded from fiber-optic cable. That’s because fiber-optic cable was considered economically infeasible due to the distance and the route the line would need to take from the hub in Montrose.
“So they went from saying they’d provide a redundant link to us, to saying they’d provide a link to Gunnison, to saying, ‘Well, we’re not going to be able to do anything—maybe in the future,’” Gunnison County technology planning team member and Mt. Crested Butte Councilman David Clayton says.
Then last December, the Department of Commerce suspended Eagle Net’s stimulus grant for concerns about changes to its network design, its accounting practices and its failure to complete certain environmental reviews associated with running cables from one place to another.
And although the suspension was lifted in April, Eagle Net’s Gunnison box had been checked and the company has moved on, transferring its operation to a for-profit company and leaving the county’s technology planning team with the same three concerns over the valley’s Internet connection: redundancy, capacity and coverage.
“They spent their money doing what was easy to get done, but they left, I think, 38 community anchor institutions out of the mix,” Clayton says. “And the NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] wants to call the project complete because it would look bad on the NTIA. We knew a year ago that Eagle Net wasn’t going. It was obvious they were going to run out of money long before they got anywhere near Hinsdale, Gunnison or anywhere in our area.”
According to Chamberland and Clayton, both of whom sit on the technology planning team, redundancy is the biggest concern because there is still just one fiber-optic cable running between the hub in Montrose and the Gunnison Valley.
“All of our connectivity comes in from Montrose on the Century Link fiber-optic cable that goes into Gunnison and gets distributed from there,” Clayton says. “So one cable cut somewhere on that 60-mile stretch, and all the Internet goes down in the valley. For a couple of years, that cable was tacked up on a fence line because the area where they’d buried it had just kind of sloughed away. So all it would have taken was one crazy cow or moose to run through the line and we’d have been done.”
Internet in the modern age is far more than just Google and email. It is also the connection between credit card and ATM machines and the outside world, the lift ticket sales desk and out-of-state customers and anyone relying on the Internet to do business.
But the size of the valley’s population has direct implications in an economy of scale—without a large grant or a bigger population, installing a cable that costs $30 a foot for buried cable doesn’t make much business sense.
“There are lots of issues that go into this and money is one of the biggest issues,” Clayton says. “So if somebody’s going to put another fiber-optic cable in here from Montrose, you’re talking 60 miles at $30 a foot. It’s not a real good proposition. That’s the issue.”
So the technology team is taking a new approach to bringing a redundant fiber-optic line to the county and, in fact, it’s already here. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which provides power to the local grid, has lines running everywhere in the state.
During recent upgrades, the company changed the groundwire along each line to an optical ground that bundles many fiber-optic lines together. And the power company uses just a few of those lines, since the capacity of a fiber-optic cable is nearly limitless with current technology.
“The fibers not used by Tri-State are excess and they’re there,” Clayton says. What Tri-Sates has said is that if the Rights-of-Way are obtained for commercial data they would be willing to lease out use of the excess fibers for use by other companies.”
But the rights of way Tri State holds to take its line across private property is for power transmission and doesn’t include the transmission of data, on which the power company would profit through the leases.
“I talked to Senator Bennet’s office and the state Office of Information Technology about finding an easy way to give the utility companies that have fiber [optic cables] the ability to run commercial traffic on their line,” says Chamberland, who has taken the lead on securing the rights of way. “Some people would say that it’s a push against property rights, because the utility company is making money on infrastructure that runs across their property. That’s the hurdle I’m facing right now. Between Gunnison and Monarch Pass there are 33 landowners. So I’m going to work on trying to perfect those easements to allow commercial traffic along that route.”
Along with the redundancy issue, another major concern for the technology planning team is capacity and accessibility, which is the problem people are facing when they try to get adequate Internet connections at home.
While Clayton points out that the fiber-optic line can carry as much data as we can pump into it, he says increasing the bandwidth on a fiber-optic line takes equipment. And if there aren’t enough customers at the end of the line to pay for the equipment, then the line never goes live.
“There’s fiber going into Hinsdale County. Century Link hasn’t lit the fiber for data services because it isn’t cost effective,” Clayton said. “They would have to put the equipment in there to repeat the signal, so they made a business decision that there wasn’t enough money there to do it.”
Clayton says the local Internet providers maintain that they can provide any amount of bandwidth to any customer, as long as the customer is willing to pay for it.
“Century Link will say they’ve got Gunnison County covered, but it’s not necessarily where people want to have it,” Clayton adds. “Century Link will also say we can provide any service to anybody that you need. All you have to do is have enough people. And you’ve got Meridian Lake that has maybe a third of the people they need to make it cost-effective for Century Link to put in the updated services. So guess what? They’re not going to want to do it unless it’s subsidized.”
But sometimes, just the suggestion that other solutions might be explored can motivate some swift action from some companies. Since the time the local technology planning team has been looking for new ways of bringing Internet to the valley, the price for broadband has dropped from $110 per mbps to $25 per mbps, Chamberland says.
And in the course of a few days after hearing that a Meridian Lake resident couldn’t get enough bandwidth to allow his kids to do schoolwork freely on the Internet or Skype with friends and family they left behind in Texas, Chamberland was able to secure some assurance from Century Link that more service would be available in Meridian Lake by the end of the year.
But for those beyond three miles from a central fiber-optics hub, which exists in Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, the opportunity to expand bandwidth could be limited to looking for alternatives, like wireless microwave Internet similar to that which provides Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory—in Gothic at the top of the East River Valley—with one of the valley’s highest capacity Internet connections. But even that has its limitations.
“Making sure competition comes to the community and redundancy comes to the community,” Clayton said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to do.”
Members of the Local Technology Planning Team (LTPT) along with others from many communities on the Western Slope are pursuing two opportunities for more funding. On one front, they’re looking, attending meetings across the Western Slope in a coordinated effort with members of Club 20 and Region 10 to solicit money from agencies like the state’s Department of Local Affairs for money that would cover the legal expenses of changing the rights of way. At the same time there’s real money – about $20 million – that’s being put in a fund from the state’s portion of the Universal Service Fee on phone bills. The thinking is that some of that money can be transferred to high-cost broadband projects.
“We could get quite a bit accomplished in our communities with $1 million of that,” Chamberland says. “That’s the kind of stuff going on right now.”
The next meeting the Local Technology Planning Team is attending is November 21.
