When Steamboat Springs resolved to improve Internet access for key community anchor institutions and businesses, they decided to make an economical investment in a carrier neutral facility to allow multiple ISPs to invest and compete with each other. In episode 163 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast, Tim Miles explains what that means and how they did it.
Tim is the Technology Director at Steamboat Springs and South Route School Districts in Colorado. He tells us about the poor connectivity the community had from CenturyLink and how they opened a bottleneck to encourage more investment. In part because of how Colorado limits local authority to build networks, they formed the Northwest Colorado Broadband Cooperative with the local Chamber of Commerce.
They are already seeing benefits in the form of lower prices for anchor institutions and reduced outages – Tim describes just how painful those outages had been when there was no local Internet choice.
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Thanks to bkfm-b-side for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Raise Your Hands.”
This article is apart of MuniNetworks. The original piece can be found here
