The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Crested Butte connectivity project still needs funding
By Katherine Nettles
Internet redundancy connecting the Gunnison Valley eastward across Cottonwood Pass to Buena Vista and beyond is well under way, and expected to be finished sometime this year, with improvements planned for both Crested Butte and Crested Butte South to come later in the future.
CenturyLink representatives met with Gunnison County commissioners earlier this month to provide an update on the fiber optic connection project going over Cottonwood Pass and to answer questions about how it will benefit residents at both ends of the valley. The project began in 2017 in conjunction with paving the western side of Cottonwood Pass.
There is still plenty of work to be done and some fine-tuning on what has been completed, according to CenturyLink representatives. The portion from Union Park Road to Cottonwood along Taylor Park is in place, and a two-mile section there still needs a few final adjustments.
“We have about 28 miles of fiber left to pull from end to end at various points this summer,” said CenturyLink director of state regulatory and government affairs Timothy Kunkleman. Once the cable is installed, he said the goal is to test it, light it and get active traffic on it. “That won’t happen until the fall, most likely. This has all been a little bit slower than we certainly have hoped and than you all had hoped,” he acknowledged.
Jack’s Cabin also ties into the project, where CenturyLink is building a total of 58 miles of fiber optic cables to intersect with Highway 135. CenturyLink representatives said they have reinforced the old fiber that had caused bottlenecking up County Road 742 (Taylor River Road).
“So we’re going to meet down at the corner of 135 and County Road 813 [Jack’s Cabin Cutoff]. From there we are going to tie into existing fibers coming into Gunnison. This will complete the loop coming into Gunnison from both directions,” said Kunkleman. Another fiber optic route from Montrose already exists.
Kunkleman added that CenturyLink has been working on fiber optic improvements to the Crested Butte side of Gunnison County as well. “But we are kind of working on this in two phases,” he said. “The fiber wasn’t going all the way to Crested Butte as it came down off the pass. We are working on some more redundancy between Gunnison and Crested Butte. We didn’t want that work to hold up the rest of this project, but we still have Crested Butte on the brain and we have some plans to move forward with that,” he said.
Commissioner Jonathan Houck asked for more details about the Crested Butte path and if it is still in the idea phase or in an actual work plan. Kunkleman replied that CenturyLink has a cable installation route engineered and planned from Jack’s Cabin to Crested Butte, but does not have it fully funded yet. He said they have been working in the area, and made it more resilient, “but not necessarily more diverse.”
Commissioner John Messner recalled a joint county commissioners meeting between Chaffee County and Gunnison in 2017, when CenturyLink initially discussed the project. There was talk about providing additional infrastructure to tie all the connectivity together, such as at Jack’s Cabin.
“I think this is going to do what we want it to do,” replied Kunkleman. “Aside from the diverse path that we have, we enhanced capacity up in Taylor Park and Harmel’s. So if folks want fiber, we have a way to feed them [fiber] where it was bottlenecked before… We like to say it’s lit up.”
Ultimately, once the Cottonwood Pass fiber project is finished, the redundancy in connectivity will give another route for the local 911 databases, decrease outages from Montrose connectivity interruptions and also provide another path out for cellular voice and data traffic. Data will take whichever route is most efficient at the time for the traffic, although consumers won’t know which it is at the time. The exceptions are, for example, that Western Colorado University may want some dedicated circuits.
Messner asked if this new route would be available to other carriers, or only for CenturyLink.
“Generally, I would say yes,” said Kunkleman after some hesitation. “I don’t think we’ve ever entered into an agreement with a county or a Region 10… but it’s something we could talk about later this year once we have this route.”
Kunkleman said CenturyLink has discussed working with Region 10 in the past, where Region 10 is also laying fiber and could coordinate locations with Century Link for better coverage.
Messner said he has heard grumbling about slow speeds in Crested Butte South and asked if there is a split in the fiber optic cables to access the subdivision as they follow Highway 135. The CenturyLink representatives responded that they have worked on specific broadband accounts for homes and businesses there, and that Crested Butte South is fed by fiber off Cement Creek Road, with some additional work this year and equipment that was upgraded a few years ago to get more DSL to customers in that area.
“I don’t know if it’s that they don’t get the speed they want, but it’s still quite well fed. If you do hear from folks and you want to pass their location information to us, we can look it up and maybe… we can get you a higher speed,” said Kunkleman. “It’s always worth asking us to take a look.”
Cellular service issues “have to do with what sort of connectivity the phone carriers purchase from our network,” said Kunkleman. CenturyLink provides the fiber for the cell towers, and the cell service carriers individually place their own equipment.
“Sometimes they do a better job of it and sometimes they do a worse job of it,” he said. The representatives also noted that slow speeds could be a matter of a few towers that are still copper-fed and do not yet have fiber—which CenturyLink hopes to address after this current project is finished.
