We’re going to elect a new governor this year, which means we’ll get some statements about leadership and some promises about taxes and state programs. But we probably won’t hear how our state government should go about delivering on some unfulfilled promises.
One such promise was called the Multi-Use Network, and construction began in 2000. It was supposed to link all 64 county seats in Colorado with fiber-optic lines laid by Qwest. The state would pay for 20 percent of the bandwidth to be used by law enforcement and the like. Other public entities could connect to it through “Project Beanpole,” which would have them aggregate their digital signals into a single connection to the fiber-optic network.
Local Internet service providers would also be able to connect, thereby providing broadband access to almost all Coloradans. The “digital divide” would be bridged. Rural areas could keep some enterprises from moving to areas with better communications and even attract new ones.
That sounded like a good idea at the time. The state government would serve as the “anchor tenant” for the network, thus providing enough guaranteed business to make it worth building, and other entities could join in.
But it never came to fruition. For one thing, it never reached every county seat. North of Durango, the fiber-optic line stops well short of the San Juan County seat of Silverton. In the summer, when the narrow-gauge train to Durango prepares to depart in the afternoon, there’s a flurry of credit-card transactions as people try to pay for meals and souvenirs in time to catch the train. And the low-capacity microwave link gets clogged.
The state says it can’t reach Silverton with the fiber-optic line on account of right-of-way problems. The Durango & Silverton Railroad says it would be glad to lease space for a fiber-optic line along its roadbed, but no one has ever approached the company about this.
So one county remains to be connected, despite the state government’s promises.
As for providing high-speed connections for other public entities, our library tried it for a few years, then switched to another service because it was cheaper and faster. I’ve had a hard time finding anybody else, at least around here, who actually connected to the Multi-Use Network.
Perhaps that is because state funding for Project Beanpole dried up after 2000. Local governments could no longer get grants to analyze their communication needs and figure out how and where to connect to the fiber-optic lines.
Also, a state audit found problems with accountability in the grants that had been made in 2000.
As for local service provider connections to the network, I asked Joe Conrad, who handles the technical stuff at Mountain Computer Wizards in Buena Vista. “We would have loved to be a local aggregation point,” he said, and then tried to explain the tech problems in a way I could understand.
Basically, the network runs under a communications protocol called “ATM” (Asynchronous Transfer Mode,), and the Internet runs under a different protocol. It’s possible to translate one to the other, but Qwest wants way too much money for that, he said. So the network hasn’t done much for small service providers.
Now consider redundancy and reliability in rural Colorado. On the afternoon of May 30, a fiber-optic line got cut by a construction worker south of Pueblo. No problem, just route the traffic over another line, right? Except there wasn’t another line.
Going without long-distance or Internet access for five hours was merely an annoyance for me. But local motels, restaurants and stores could not process credit cards. Tourists could not call home. Banks couldn’t do their end-of-day reckoning. Emergency 911 service in the San Luis Valley, as well as the Trinidad and Walsenburg areas, was lost. Obviously, there isn’t an alternate connection.
One would hope that the candidates for governor would show some interest in getting the state to keep previous promises. Some old business ought to be settled before any new promises are made.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
