The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Ponies up first money toward better infrastructure
By Mark Reaman
Crested Butte is still walking down the path of trying to get better broadband and internet redundancy into the county and town. The Town Council agreed on Monday, November 7 to continue funding efforts to better the service.
Crested Butte, the city of Gunnison, Gunnison County and Mt. Crested Butte have all worked with the Colorado Department of Local Affairs and Region 10, a group of counties organized to help the regional economy to enhance its broadband service. The group is at the phase of working toward improving broadband infrastructure to Gunnison and then to Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte.
There is also an effort with Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) and Western State Colorado University about potentially using so-called dark fiber on their transmission lines that could provide fiber connections to the east and west of Gunnison. This would provide even better redundancy to help prevent any outages.
The council has already committed about $40,000 to the Region 10 effort in the 2017 budget. At the last meeting they agreed to spend no more than $6,000 for some engineering and design costs that would address the “middle mile” network within the town that would go from the CenturyLink office in Crested Butte to the marshal’s office.
“This will set us up for the future,” said Crested Butte mayor Glenn Michel. “It is all very complex and evolving, but it should improve our broadband service by putting in infrastructure for the future. It will be beneficial to everyone in the valley, citizens and visitors, and could actually encourage competition that would reduce costs. This keeps us heading down the path of better broadband service.”
