Rio Blanco County is a large, rural county in northwestern Colorado that has two population centers. The county has a sharp plan for building FTTH to the population centers and wireless across most of the county to improve Internet access in a region the national carriers have little interest in.
In this week’s episode, we interview county IT Director Blake Mobley, who has long been involved in improving Internet access for community anchor institutions in the area. We talk about their plan and how they are financing it (enabled in part by the Department of Local Affairs in Colorado – which has helped many community networks).
We also discuss many other aspects of what it takes to create a project like this — including building trust among local stakeholders — and their particular open access approach and terminology for the different layers in the stack of entities involved.
Finally, Blake tells us what they believe has to happen for the project to be successful. Read their vision statement here. Read our full coverage of Rio Blanco County stories here.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below.
This show is 23 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.
Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.
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
