If you are in Longmont, you can sign up for gigabit service from LPC for only $49.95 per month. The Longmont Compass reports that customers who sign up within the first three months will retain that price point for an as yet undetermined extended period. AND, that price stays with the home if the customer sells, adding substantial value to the real estate.

The Compass also spoke with General Manager Tom Roiniotis about LPC's decision to offer Internet and voice but not video: 

“Cable TV is a dying industry. People want to get the TV that they want, not the TV that the cable companies force them to get.”

When pressed for an example, Roiniotis considered sports. If you want to watch an NFL game, why should you have to pay for two hundred channels you’ll never even tune into? There is a growing consensus that audiences don’t want to watch the movie that happens to be on Showtime right now, they want to choose when to start, when to pause, and what movie they’re interested in. As he put it, “The consumer is finally becoming king in the world of TV.”

…

“In five years, I can see Xfinity (the Comcast content delivery network) using our fiber-optic to deliver their content,” he says. “So instead of investing another $20M in the technology to deliver cable, we save that money and let the consumers drive the future of content delivery.”

LPC began construction on the expansion in August with completion scheduled for 2017. Last fall, voters passed a referendum to bond in order to speed up construction.

Letters to the editor from Longmont locals express impatience. They want better services! P.R. Lambert recently wrote:

It's really sad that the Longmont fiber optic Internet will take so long to be installed. From what I see, the two major competitors (Comcast and Century Link) seem to believe that customers are a bother.

SB 152, the telecom incumbent-supported Colorado law that restricts municipalities from building broadband networks or even partnering with other entities to do the same, is increasingly coming under fire. The City of Longmont passed a referendum to restore its local authority in 2011 and has started construction on a project that will make it Colorado's first gig city.

Centennial and Montrose voters have chosen to restore their authority as well. Boulder plans to put a similar measure to the test in elections this fall. So far, every community in Colorado that has put restoring local authority on the ballot has gotten it done - despite heavy incumbent spending and astroturf activism.

Now, an editorial in the Denver Post has called even more attention to the issue of SB 152 and the anti-competitive, undemocratic environment it has created in the State of Colorado: 

The statute created by SB 152 needs to go away. While civic and business leaders tout ambitious projects to connect the state with the rest of the world, Colorado is falling behind because of artificial constraints to broadband expansion.

Longmont pioneers saw past all of that and pushed through, even in the face of well-financed opposition. A few other communities are starting to see the advantage of bucking SB 152.

Longmont's Roiniotis says the question he hears almost constantly is, "When am I going to get my gig?"

It is a question the entire state should ask.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. 

Construction on Longmont's fiber expansion will begin by August 13th, reports the Times-Call. TCS Communications of Englewood, Colorado recently signed an agreement with Longmont Power & Communications (LPC) to deploy the gigabit network for $20,095,022. Completion is scheduled for 2017.

A July 14th article on the project noted that LPC and TCS will complete construction in six phases. A substantial number of potential subscribers will have access early in the process:

The first phase will be done in south-central Longmont, the area nearest to LPC itself. The work will then proceed into central Longmont by early 2015. At that pace, 11,147 of the utility's 39,061 customers would be able to get fiber service within a year of the start of construction.

Readers will recall that last November the people of Longmont voted to approve a $45.3 million bond issue to bring the network to every premise in the city. Chris spoke with Vince Jordan, one of LPC's champions, in episode #106 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast.

Clearly, LPC is carrying on the customer service priority established by Jordan and the LPC crew:

"We set a high bar with regards to quality of work, customer service and timeline," LPC general manager Tom Roiniotis said in a release Monday evening. "We want to make sure it is done efficiently; we want to make sure it is done right."

LPC provides updates and a map of the project at its website. 

Boulder's City Council is considering November ballot question to restore local authority for municipal telecommunications services. The measure, if passed, will create an exemption to the 2005 Colorado law allowing Boulder to better use its existing fiber optic infrastructure.

Apparently, the Boulder community has a self-reliant streak. This is not the first time the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has reported on the community of 97,000. John Farrell, Director of the Democratic Energy initiative, has followed the grassroots campaign to establish a city-owned electric utility in Boulder.

The Daily Camera reports that City Council staff, in a memo to Members, recommend the community seek authority to make use of existing assets. The City owns an extensive network of conduit that it began developing in the 1990s. Boulder has aggressively expanded the network, leasing it to private partners and using the space for a fiber I-Net to connect over 50 municipal facilities.

The Boulder Research and Administration Network (BRAN) serves the City, the University of Colorado, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Each of the four entities shared equally in funding the $1.2 million eleven mile network. Boulder is an administering partner for BRAN and hopes to capitalize on that relationship even further.

Approximately 10% of Boulder's residents have home-based businesses, reports City Council staff. The community ranks high in the concentration of software engineers, innovators, and scientists. Businesses with less than 100 employees comprise 97% of firms in Boulder. Local surveys indicate the business community is hungry for better services. From the Daily Camera article:

[Director of Information Technology Don] Ingle said the city has no concrete plans in place to pursue partners, but he believes there will be a lot of interest if Boulder can get the authority.

If you can make it to Vail in early June, you can enjoy more than the summer mountains. The Mountain Connect Rural Broadband Conference is scheduled for June 8, 9, and 10 at the Vail Cascade Resort and Spa.

From the conference website:

This year our conference theme is “Progress through Education” and it’s our hope that, through our conference topics and speakers, we explore lessons learned and alternative ideas to successfully implement rural broadband initiatives.  For the first time in our MountainConnect history, we are soliciting voices from around the U.S. to broaden our knowledge base and, in some ways, take us down a path we have yet to travel.

Topics include economic development, fiber and wireless communities, telehealth, education, digital media consumption trends, and legislation.

Speakers include a long list of familiar names from private industry, education, and public policy.

Chris will be moderating a panel on community networks on June 9th at 4 p.m. You can check out the full agenda online to plan your visit. 

Last week, we were excited by the results of Longmont's referendum, but we sure weren't alone. The Washington Post's Brian Fung wrote, "Big Cable may have felled Seattle's mayor, but it couldn't stop this Colo. project." 

Our regular readers know that Comcast succeeded in defeating the Longmont measure in 2009 but the electoral would not be swayed by false promises and lies the second time in 2011. This year's proposal asked voters to approve a revenue bond for $45.3 million to speed up a planned expansion, which voters approved 2:1.

Contrary to past experience, Comcast and allies did not launch a full frontal assault in Longmont this year to sway the vote. Fung's article looks at the math for a possible  explanation:

There are 27,000 households in Longmont. Even if the city were to connect all of the eligible homes [close to the fiber ring] to its existing fiber network overnight, it would still reach only 1,100 residences. Cable companies therefore spent over half a million dollars [in 2011] trying to prevent four percent of city households from gaining access to municipal fiber on any reasonable timescale. That's around $600 a home, or six months' worth of Xfinity Triple Play.

Even if the cable companies decide it was not worth the fight in Longmont, they have shown repeatedly that they have cash, will travel. Fung's article describes another 2009 election in which the cable industry spent large to prevent public investment in fiber:

In North St. Paul, Minn., a 2009 ballot measure to let muni fiber move forward was defeated by a resounding 34-point margin. Opposition to the fledgling network, PolarNet, was led by the Minnesota Cable Communications Association. In the weeks leading up to the vote, it and other opposition groups spent some $40,000 campaigning against the measure. MCCA alone contributed more than $15,000 to the effort over the same period.

2B's passage means approval for the city to issue $45.3 million in bonds to build out the city's 17-mile fiber optic loop within three years. Longmont Power & Communications has estimated that the payback time on the bond will be 11 years. If revenues from commercial and residential customers fall short, LPC's electric service revenues will be used to make up the shortfall, LPC staffers have told the Longmont City Council.

McGinn’s fate was forecast two years ago, when voters slapped back his efforts to obstruct the Highway 99 tunnel project, opting to move ahead with the long-debated project. McGinn’s anti-tunnel agitating was viewed as a reversal from his 2009 election-eve pledge not to stand in the project’s way.

November 5th probably seems like deja vu for the people of Longmont, Colorado. For the third time, the voters will respond to a ballot question that will impact their community's connectivity. Past referendums addressed whether or not the community could use its fiber ring for connecting businesses and residents.

They now have that authority. This year the question will be "when?"

Local incumbent providers grossly outspent municipal network supporters in 2009 and in 2011 with astroturf campaigns against referendums. Nevertheless, voters decided in 2011 to grant the local utility permission to use existing fiber resources to bring connectivity to businesses and residents. 

Since then, Longmont Power and Communications (LPC) began a slow build-out of fiber to businesses and homes within 500 feet of the existing loop. Local businesses, frustrated with poor service from Comcast and CenturyLink, jumped at the opportunity to have real high-speed connections. With a long list of businesses in queue for their connections, the City Council voted to use LPC reserve funds to connect businesses and residents to the loop. Clearly, the people of Longmont were ready for something better than the existing incumbent services.

Local blogger Steve Elliott connected to the service in September. To satisfy his curiosity, he ran speed tests immediately before and after he transitioned from Comcast service.

Comcast timed in at 26.08 Mbps download and 5.76 Mbps upload. LPC provided 89.99 Mbps download and 62.01 Mbps upload. 

From his post: