On Saturday, the House passed the long bill, the name given to the 600-plus-page spending measure adopted each year. But not without some short-lived intrigue: Earlier in the week, Rep. Brandi Bradley, a Republican, triggered the legislative equivalent of the nuclear option and asked that the entire bill be read aloud.

That request — all 15 hours of it, in this case — must be honored. A computer in the House began reading the bill Thursday night, then picked up again Friday morning and finished a half-day later.

When the reading finally concluded Friday night, House leaders quickly moved to wrap things up. They invoked a rule that limited debate on the budget to one hour, and the chamber then passed the full budget — and several dozen subsidiary spending bills — on Saturday.

As an aside (and warning of things to come): Working weekends isn’t all that unusual for the legislature, especially in the final weeks of the session and double-especially when the minority caucus (or, in this case, one member of the minority) slows down the House’s proceedings.

Bradley’s move, which she made to protest how the House handled her ethics complaint against a fellow Republican, was significant in how unusual it was and how long it took to overcome. Still, it only modestly upset the legislature’s apple cart.

The Senate will begin deliberating on the budget this week, as it was scheduled to, and that chamber should have its work wrapped up by week’s end. After that’s done, the lawmakers who write the budget will gather in committee to consider — and definitely not instantly smite — the various changes their colleagues made to the document on the floor during its two-week legislative voyage.

Lost sleep for Colorado lawmakers as they reckon with budget cuts for disabled people, immigrant children

Once that's all wrapped up (likely next week), the budget will roll down the Capitol stairs to the governor's office for signature into law.

Given how much time and energy the budget takes up, expect little else to happen in the Senate this week. The House has a modest committee schedule, with more legislation likely set for debates in the full chamber.

Once the budget's cleared, we'll enter the final, frantic weeks of session. The last day is May 13.

That caveat aside, here's what you can expect to see in the legislature this week, with schedules subject to change.

Monday

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to take up , which is aimed at helping shore up the state's criminal justice competency system. The committee will also take up several bills related to easing the state's prison population, a key demand of lawmakers as Gov. Jared Polis looks to open new detention facilities.

The House's Finance Committee is scheduled to hear , which would further tighten how state and local authorities interact with federal immigration efforts.

Tuesday

The Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee will debate , which seeks to curb financial scams against older and vulnerable adults. That bill generated some controversy in the House because of the various forms of immunity it would grant to banks.

Potential floor debates

Other bills are due for discussion but lack certain timing. The House is scheduled this week to debate , which would regulate gun barrels. That bill's kicked around on the House's calendar for a few weeks now.

Fresh off of , the House is also scheduled to bring up this week. That bill would make it harder for some agricultural workers to qualify for overtime.

Manuel went after the dog in their Colorado Springs neighborhood. A stranger ran with him, trying to help, and when they reached the startled animal, the dog bit the stranger.

Law enforcement showed up. Manuel was given a court hearing for the dog bite.

The case was later dismissed. But when Manuel left the courthouse in September, he said two cars followed him. The 23-year-old stopped for gas and was quickly surrounded by federal agents from .

The undocumented immigrant, who had come with his parents from Mexico when he was 3 years old and had never been in trouble with the law before the dog bite, was detained in the state’s only immigration facility in Aurora for the next two months.

“It was not very pleasant,” he said. He spoke on condition that he only be identified by his middle name to speak candidly about his experiences with the federal government. “I’ve never been in trouble before. It really takes a toll on you mentally.”

As federal authorities pursue President Donald Trump’s goal of arresting and deporting millions of immigrants without legal status, they moved last summer to block longtime U.S. residents from requesting bail in immigration cases, and they have kept others, who would have been released under previous administrations, detained indefinitely.

Caught in that cycle, Manuel was only released after his attorneys filed — and a judge granted — a habeas petition in federal court.

Once a technically complicated legal rarity used to challenge improper incarcerations, habeas corpus petitions have become the predominant avenue for immigrants seeking release from detentions that increasingly end only with a deportation order.

With bail sharply curtailed and other avenues of release all but closed off, Colorado has seen an explosion of habeas cases: In the first 100 days of 2026, more than 370 detained immigrants have asked federal judges to either grant them bail hearings denied by ICE, or to release them altogether. The surge is an unprecedented increase from 2025’s total of 104 and 2024’s total of a bare dozen.

In his first 19 years as a lawyer, Denver immigration attorney Hans Meyer said he’d filed six habeas cases. In the past six months, his firm filed 60. When ICE first moved to withhold bail from a broad swath of detainees last summer, few people in detention were aware that filing habeas petitions was an option.

“The first three months, very few people understood the issue,” Meyer said. “For the next three months, people might know it was an option, but didn’t know much more. But now people in detention always go to habeas first.”

So significant is the crush that attorneys from the , which oversees ICE, have stepped in to help federal prosecutors deal with the cases. The highest-ranking federal prosecutor in the state, U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly, has also personally handled some of the petitions. It’s the only time this century that a U.S. attorney has made personal appearances on such cases, The Denver Post found.

The declined to comment for this story. Jeffrey Colwell, the clerk for the , confirmed The Post’s case data.

“It does put a significant burden on our judges and chambers,” he said. “It’s 300-plus cases that we haven’t historically seen.”

In an unsigned statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it abides by court orders and was unsurprised by the habeas surge, claiming “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”

Peering inside the ‘deportation machine’

Habeas petitions have been a part of American law since the nation’s founding, and they’ve been used in immigration proceedings in past years, too.

They’re used generally to challenge someone’s detention or incarceration, though not necessarily the underlying case that led to that confinement. Immigrants who are released or given bail hearings through habeas cases are still subject to deportation proceedings — like Manuel, whose immigration case remains underway.

But these petitions offer an avenue out of detention, and their prominence is surging, particularly as — which fall under the authority of the federal government — bend to the Trump administration’s goals.

The assumption that immigration courts can resolve detention questions “no longer holds,” the . Instead, immigration lawyers are taking their arguments out of immigration hearings and into federal court, where appointed judges can’t be removed on a whim. Indeed, they’ve shown a “striking willingness to intervene” in detention cases, the association wrote.

Because habeas cases are complicated — but the need for them is now enormous — immigration attorneys have also worked to train more lawyers on how to file them. Laura Lunn, of the , said she’s hosting a “massive training” at the end of April with the to bring non-immigration lawyers up to speed on writing and filing habeas petitions.

For this story, The Post reviewed scores of habeas petitions and hundreds of pages of court filings, along with publicly available arrest and court data detailing ICE practices. If the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is a “deportation machine,” as Meyer describes it, then the habeas petitions provide a glimpse into that machine’s inner workings. The filings describe both how immigrants end up in detention as well as the efforts that Trump officials have undertaken to keep them detained.

One man was arrested at an Ace Hardware. A Colombian father was arrested in Lakewood the same day he and his wife were set to close on a house. Several said they were arrested after they showed up for routine immigration check-ins at ICE offices in Colorado. A man from Guinea arrived at his case worker’s office to have his ankle monitor removed and found ICE agents waiting for him instead.

One man showed up for work at the , where he was directed to wait for a new ID badge in a side room, his lawyers later alleged. ICE agents came instead.

Upending nearly three decades of federal law, Manuel and many of those who’ve filed habeas petitions were denied bail during their detention proceedings. That about-face is the primary cause of the habeas crush: Since the mid-1990s, federal immigration authorities and the court system that oversees them would release immigrants who had no criminal record and were arrested within America’s interior.

Under the Trump administration, however, ICE and the courts have moved to keep those immigrants in custody, denying them bail under a separate federal law previously reserved for people arrested at the border.

The that ICE is now employing to block many immigrants from bail also requires mandatory detention — which attorneys argue is the point. Detention centers are like prisons, and 65% of immigrants arrested in Colorado over the past year have never been convicted of a crime. They’re likely not used to facilities like the one in Aurora, where the lights stay on at all times and the food, Manuel said, is often soggy or inedible.

Without access to bail, many detainees choose to leave: Aurora has seen a jump in deportation orders in the past year, including an unprecedented surge in immigrants asking for immediate removal.

Surging cases tied to size of Aurora facility

The increase in Colorado habeas filings is also partially driven by the size of the Aurora detention center, which can hold more than 1,500 people at any one time. It’s one of the largest facilities in the United States and attracts arrestees from across the country — meaning more people seeking release.

Attorneys for a Maryland man said he was arrested after ICE checked license plates in his neighborhood and discovered he had a “derogatory immigration history.” A teenager in New York, brought to the U.S. as a minor, was arrested after he got into a fender-bender in a snowstorm. Several men were arrested during traffic stops in Florida. All eventually were brought to the detention center in Aurora.

The filings detail myriad other ways the Trump administration has sought to keep immigrants detained.

When bail is granted, ICE appeals, prolonging detention for 90 more days. Some people with years-old removal orders have been re-arrested. For years, deportations could be indefinitely delayed if an immigrant successfully argued that they’d be tortured or persecuted if they were returned home. They would often be released and told to check in regularly with federal authorities.

Now, however, ICE will hold those individuals — who are often religious or political minorities, or members of the LGBTQ+ community — while they try to find another country to send them.

The Post reviewed more than a dozen habeas petitions filed in recent months by those immigrants detained in Colorado. Several detainees were transgender and feared they would be harmed or killed if they were returned home. One gay man from a country in North Africa was nearly deported to Cameroon, , before his habeas petition was granted.

If another country won’t take the detainees, then they languish in detention.

For those cases, as well as for detainees seeking bail, “habeas is the only way that most folks are getting out of detention, and more folks are being both arrested and held in detention than ever before,” said Shira Hereld, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.

Indeed, immigration arrests in Colorado surged nearly 300% during Trump’s first year in office. The Aurora detention center has also flexed to its maximum capacity, and by the end of 2025, the facility regularly housed more than 1,400 people at a time.

Federal judges push back

As the flood of habeas petitions washed into federal courtrooms in Denver, judges have repeatedly rejected ICE’s effort to rewrite federal law and have ordered bail hearings or the immediate release of immigrants. They’ve also ordered the release of some people held indefinitely while ICE searches for a country to take them.

Of the more than 100 habeas petitions that have already been closed this year, a federal judge rejected only one, The Post found, while a few dozen more were duplicates or were dismissed voluntarily.

One attorney wrote to a Colorado judge that ICE’s position has been rejected more than 1,500 times nationwide. In their petitions, some attorneys have taken to listing the individual habeas cases that the Trump administration has lost, a tally that stretches over multiple pages.

In its unsigned statement, the Homeland Security Department said it was “applying the law as written. If an immigration judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”

In January, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that “the court has concluded, many times over,” that ICE’s interpretation was incorrect. In March, U.S. District Judge Regina Rodriguez granted another petition and wrote that she was “once more (joining) the chorus of courts in this district and around the nation that have overwhelmingly rejected (ICE’s) position.”

“Sometimes it is difficult to arrive at conclusions or resolve issues, due, perhaps, to an issue’s complexity, or the lack of guidance available to help resolve it,” U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney wrote in another case from January. “Neither circumstance is present here.”

Still, the lower-court rulings have not shifted ICE’s posture, and immigrants arrested in Colorado are still routinely denied bail.

A class-action lawsuit challenging the practice, filed by Meyer, the Denver immigration lawyer, and the , earned an initial favorable ruling but is now awaiting a higher court’s intervention. A judge in California struck down ICE’s new bail policy in December, but that ruling has also been held up as a higher court considers it. Another federal appeals court has backed the policy.

The regional rulings point to a prolonged legal battle.

“This is an alley knife fight,” Meyer said. “It’s going to play out circuit court by circuit court, and then end up at the Supreme Court.”

Until the Supreme Court weighs in, “we’re all running around like chickens with our heads cut off every day,” Lunn said, “because the law changes every day depending on which court rules. And we’re having to bring individual challenges for each and every client when the fundamental issue is these massive policies that impact everybody across the country.”

‘A dream that ended up becoming a nightmare’

In the meantime, the number of habeas cases filed in Colorado will only grow. For people like Javier Campos, it offers the only way out.

In July, ICE agents pulled Campos over in Aurora and arrested him. He spent nearly 100 days in the Aurora detention center before he was released last fall. He lost weight because the food was inedible, he said in an interview. He struggled with Bell’s palsy, a neurological condition that causes paralysis in facial muscles.

Through a translator, Campos described his experience in the immigration system as “disgraceful.” A citizen of Mexico, he’d been in the U.S. for 30 years. He worked in the construction industry. He had a wife, and four children who were U.S. citizens. In another time, detention would have been unlikely, and bail a given.

He was initially granted bail in August — $10,000, a sum far higher than what was typical in previous years, immigration lawyers said. Attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security immediately appealed, blocking Campos’ release for three more months. That prompted the habeas filing.

He was finally released shortly before Thanksgiving, but his immigration case continues.

“A lot of the people would just give up their rights and leave because it gets really difficult to not have money to pay for an attorney,” Campos said. “A lot of people would just give up and leave and be deported. It was very sad seeing the things that went on there because a lot of guys came here for a dream that ended up becoming a nightmare — such a bad nightmare that it would cause stress and nightmares we couldn’t wake up from.”

Denver is signing receiver Elijah Moore to the practice squad Tuesday, multiple sources confirmed to The Denver Post.

Moore visited Denver on Monday and is now joining the locker room in the midst of the club’s nine-game winning streak.

The former Ole Miss standout has bounced around — the Broncos are his fifth team in four seasons — but he’s also produced at multiple stops, including in a game against Denver last year with Cleveland.

Moore that night had eight catches for 111 yards in a wild game at Empower Field. Overall on the season, he caught 61 passes for 538 yards for the Browns. He put up similar numbers in Cleveland the year before — 59 catches for 640 yards and two touchdowns — and caught 80 passes for 984 yards and six touchdowns over his first two professional seasons with the New York Jets.

Moore originally was a second-round draft pick out of Ole Miss in 2021, taken No. 34 overall.

He played nine games for Buffalo this season and logged 186 total offensive snaps. He caught eight catches for 112 yards before the Bills released him Nov. 26.

Broncos coach Sean Payton has continuously expressed confidence in his receiver group, though Denver has tinkered with the mix in recent weeks. The Broncos released veteran Trent Sherfield last month and signed Lil’Jordan Humphrey off of the New York Giants’ practice squad.

Moore, if nothing else, will attempt to get up to speed quickly in Denver and serve as veteran depth in case of an injury in the group. When he’s at his best, though, he’s a versatile playmaker. The Broncos saw that up close a year ago.

In a corresponding move, the Broncos are releasing undrafted rookie wide receiver Kyrese Rowan from the practice squad, a source confirmed to The Post. Rowan re-signed to Denver’s practice squad in October after being waived during final roster cuts.

On Colorado’s Eastern Plains, the city of Fort Morgan invested $6 million of its own money to build a fiber-optic network after years of hearing from residents and businesses struggling to make do with inadequate internet service.

The two scenarios underscore that the digital divide isn’t just between urban and rural. Outside the Interstate 25 and 70 corridors, where great distances and low populations make providing internet more expensive, there can be wide variations of service and coverage.

State officials say 87% of rural Colorado has access to broadband, but that number comes with asterisks. State and federal officials acknowledge that more precise mapping is needed to pinpoint which areas need to be brought up to speed.

“You can look at maps and say, ‘Oh, this community is served.’ Well, the community within a quarter mile of the community center may be served, but the folks outside of that are either underserved or completely unserved,” said Nate Walowitz, the regional broadband program director at the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.

The council is among the public agencies across Colorado leveraging state and federal grants and building partnerships to deliver the reliable, high-speed internet they agree is a necessity, not a luxury, in the 21st century. They say up-to-date service is key to growing the economy in rural communities and luring people looking to escape the congestion and rising costs of the Front Range and mountain hot spots.

In Routt County, where places such as Steamboat Springs face pressure from growing populations and high prices, it would make sense for people to relocate to some of the smaller outlying communities, such as Yampa and Oak Creek and Hayden, said Tim Corrigan, a county commissioner.

“But without adequate broadband service, it’s a nonstarter,” he said.

The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have spent billions of dollars nationwide to extend broadband internet to outlying areas. In Colorado, state agencies have allocated tens of millions of dollars in local grants to build out high-speed networks.

The state distributed $20.2 million in mineral severance tax revenues from 2013-18, said Greg Winkler, a regional manager with the Local governments matched the state funds, boosting the total to $40.4 million, he added.

“Our executive director as of August of this year has allocated $5 million a year for the next five years, so that’s another $25 million,” Winkler said.

The money will go for so-called “middle-mile” development, or the fiber network that hooks up to the large-capacity trunks and lays the groundwork for connections to homes and businesses.

Rather than waiting for the big internet providers to lay more fiber to sparsely populated parts of the state, more and more rural communities are the using grants, local money and forming public/private partnerships to find their own solutions.

Banding together for broadband

A $750,000 grant from the Department of Local Affairs helped Routt County, the city of Steamboat Springs, the local school district, hospital and the Yampa Valley Electric Association to install a $2.2 million fiber-optic network connecting those anchor institutions. The group, called Northwest Colorado Broadband, formed about five years ago and negotiated with Wyoming-based Mammoth Networks to provide the middle-mile infrastructure.

“We’re beginning to see some results,” Corrigan said. “Unfortunately, it����ap still all in Steamboat Springs. We have been unable to identify a private partner that is really interested in getting out to serve the outlying parts of the county.”

The ranch where Anne Clyncke’s family raises hay in south Routt County and where she works remotely as a consultant for an Atlanta-based firm is one of those outlying areas. The family receives internet via satellite, which is expensive and has caps on the data.

Clyncke’s children can’t do some of their homework online. Her husband wants to stream a livestock auction instead of driving hours to attend in person. The family’s previous satellite company would sell customers extra data, but the current one doesn’t. So, they still stream the hours-long auctions, but it catches up with them.

“It will eat up our data and it will be slow later on in the month,” Clyncke said. “Sometimes I’ll travel to the library to work if we’re out of data.”

In north Routt County, the charter school where Brandon LaChance is executive director combines its DSL service, which runs over phone lines, and internet via satellite.

‘We kind of have a piecemeal approach of two services that don’t complete a whole service for us,” he said.

However, the less-than-ideal internet at North Routt Community Charter School is light-years ahead of that in homes of many of the students and staff members. Several of the homes in the area about 17 miles north of Steamboat Springs have only a dial-up connection, which is slower than DSL, or satellite internet. Or nothing.

LaChance has a dial-up connection. Besides slow, unreliable internet, his cellphone service is poor, he said. While home recently to take care of his sick kids, he couldn’t access his email on his phone nor respond to a reporter’s request for an interview about his school’s internet service.

Through the years, proposals by companies to serve the area have fallen through, including one to run fiber to the school. After the school spent money on a connecting line, LaChance said the company backed out, saying it had made “a math mistake.”

LaChance said he’s proud of his school’s culture, which emphasizes reading and collaboration, and the fact that “our kids aren’t walking around with cellphones and wires hooked up to their heads.”

“But as much as we enjoy the lack of access at the certain appropriate times in a school, we don’t have that access when it����ap needed,” he said.

Light at the end of the fiber?

The only hope that LaChance sees on the horizon is the Yampa Valley Electric Association and its subsidiary, Luminate Broadband. Yampa Valley, part of Northwest Colorado Broadband, is using infrastructure, rights of way and other facilities it has to deliver electricity to members of its cooperative to now deliver fiber-optic broadband, which transmits data by light signals over long strands of glass.

“We’ve seen a little bit of growth and interest from internet service providers in coming into the community to help build out the infrastructure, but we didn’t see a lot of interest,” said Steve Johnson, CEO and general manager of Yampa Valley and president of Luminate. “We want to see northwest Colorado have broadband equivalent to what other parts of the country have.”

Johnson lives in the same neighborhood as LaChance. He knows the struggles area residents face. He sees kids routinely congregate at a local store so they can tap into the internet.

“Yampa Valley has all the infrastructure. We have the ability to do it because of what we do on the electric side. If we don’t do it nobody else is going to,” Johnson said.

Luminate got word that it will receive state funds and is applying for more. After about eight months of construction, the company can serve roughly 5,000 customers. It hopes to increase that to 23,000 homes and businesses by the second quarter of 2021.

Luminate runs fiber to the home and offers customers speeds up to 1 gigabit, or 1,000 megabits.

Other rural electric associations in Colorado and across the country are reprising with broadband the role they played in the last century with electricity and phone service —  serving people in places where private companies can’t afford or don’t want to go. has approved broadband funding for REAs. The says more than 110 electric cooperatives are working on providing broadband internet to rural areas.

Megabits and economics

The importance of access to high-speed internet goes far beyond being able to stream movies. It can make or break a local economy, business and government leaders say.

In the past, poor broadband service has discouraged people from moving to the Crawford and Paonia areas in Delta County, said Liz Heidrick, the owner of Needleock Mountain Realty and Land.

“When people ask about the area, one of the first things they ask is how fast is the internet. It wasn’t like that when I first started 15 years ago,” Heidrick said.

Thanks to Elevate Fiber, a subsidiary of the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, Heidrick said the news is better these days. Paonia’s service was upgraded first, and then Crawford’s, she said. She credits better internet service for a 20% to 25% jump in her sales.

“Literally, our sales have increased as a result of people being able to access internet in a rural setting,” Heidrick said.

The fact that people and business throughout Fort Morgan now have access to as much as 1 gigabit of broadband service is a marketing tool for the northeast Colorado community.

“In terms of economic development, it’s something you’re going to find in all of our marketing materials,” said Sarah Crosthwaite, the city’s economic development specialist.

Crosthwaite believes the upgraded service has helped the city retain businesses and makes it a standout in the area. “I think there’s a little bit of a shock that we have it,” she said.

Models for a broadband future?

For several years, businesses in Fort Morgan told city officials that they couldn’t operate with the available internet. But there was a limited number of internet providers around and the larger companies didn’t seem interested in providing higher-speed service to the area, said John Brennan, the deputy city manager and city clerk.

“We were really at a disadvantage,” Brennan said.

So, the city, which owns and operates its own utilities, decided to build its own network, starting construction in 2017. In  2018, Fort Morgan signed an agreement with a Nebraska-based internet provider, Allo Communications. Allo leases and operates the system, which can provide speeds of up to 1 gigabit.

Brennan said the city has invested about $6 million of its reserves on the project. He said other communities are looking at what the northeastern Colorado city has done.

“The council has decided it was something that was necessary for the future of the city and was willing to make that investment,” Brennan said.

The city expects to make back its investment through its lease with Allo.

Across the state and to the mountains in the west, another venture is making strides. The has teamed up with state agencies, municipalities, counties and companies on Project Thor, a roughly 400-mile fiber-optic loop that started taking form in 2014.

The network leases space on systems put in place by the Colorado Department of  Transportation, CenturyLink and others. It is designed to provide redundancy for communities  that can find themselves with no internet for hours or longer if someone on a backhoe, for example, cuts a line. It also provides the building block for communities or companies to expand service to under-served or unserved areas.

The loop starts in Denver, runs west to Rifle, heads north toward Meeker, along U.S. 40 into Steamboat Springs and then back to Denver. The top speed is 200 gigabits.

“We were focused primarily on local projects, whether it be getting broadband access to the town of Red Cliff to helping and working with communities in Routt County and Steamboat Springs and their alliance,” said Walowitiz, the council’s regional broadband program director.

So far, Project Thor, named after the hammer-wielding Norse god, has received $1.27 million in grants from the Department of Local Affairs and another $1.5 million from local governments. Segments of the network are up and running, while others will be tested and come online soon.

“We do think there’s a potential for this to be a public template,” said Jon Stavney, executive director of the regional council. “The state and CDOT are watching.”

So is CenturyLink. The company has taken its lumps for getting federal money to serve rural areas even while many communities still have inadequate service.

“I hear it firsthand when I travel around the state,” said Guy Gunther, CenturyLink’s senior director of consumer broadband strategy.

Gunther said he tells people that while the FCC takes input on which areas to target, “at the end of the day it’s their decision.” But that hasn’t stopped the company from looking for ways to get broadband to more of rural Colorado despite the geographic and economic challenges, he said.  For example, CenturyLink took advantage of roadwork being done on Cottonwood Pass to lay fiber that will help improve service to Crested Butte and Buena Vista.

It was one of the ideas driving Colorado’s beleaguered, $100.6 million EAGLE-Net program that tried — and failed — to bring high-speed internet to every school district in the state.

When it comes to being able to connect to high-speed internet in rural Colorado, “universal service” is still an aspiration, not a reality.

“We get the internet to bring up my email and stuff like that. It takes forever,” Denise Beanland said of the quality of her home internet connection this month. “I can’t upload pictures. You can’t really watch a movie without it stopping several times. It’s just very, very slow.”

Beanland, 64, lives about a quarter mile outside Dove Creek, a town of fewer than 750 people a few miles from the Utah border in the southwest part of the state. the town manager, describes high-speed internet service in the Western Slope community as “pretty much nonexistent.”

Thousands of unserved households

For now, most of the homes in Dove Creek and surrounding Dolores County are a part of the 13% of rural households in Colorado state officials consider unserved by broadband internet.  , broadband is internet service that can deliver download speeds of at least 25 mbps and upload speeds of at least 3 mbps.

“Broadband has become an essential service, just as electricity used to be a century ago,” Eun-A Park, an associate professor at Western Colorado University in Gunnison who studies telecommunications policy, wrote in an email to The Denver Post.

High-speed internet has become a cornerstone of modern business, education and health care, Park said.

“Rural areas need these services too, in fact, more than cities do, since the physical infrastructure (for example, health clinics or high-quality schools) is not available in rural areas,” she wrote.

With upward of 600,000 rural households in the state, an 87% service rate means somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 90,000 households are living with subpar internet, according to state officials’ estimates.

It’s a significant step up from a few years ago. In May 2017, just 73% of rural households had broadband, according to state figures. Colorado has a long way to go to reach its next goal: 92% rural access by June 2020.

Tony Neal-Graves, executive director of the state’s broadband office, knows there are plenty of barriers to that goal, starting with collecting reliable information about who has broadband and who doesn’t.

“The challenge that we have with our metric is that we’re reliant on the service providers in the state of Colorado to give us the information,” Neal-Graves said. “They’re not required to. There is no regulation that says they need to tell us who they are serving and list the quality of that broadband that they’re providing.”

Neal-Graves has held leadership positions with companies such as AT&T, Intel and Bell Laboratories. He was named to his post in the broadband office in March 2017, tasked with steering the state’s efforts to expand access.

As demonstrated by the data mapping issue, his hands are tied by how broadband services are regulated in this country.

“There is a big debate that I think needs to go on nationally at the federal level of whether or not you want to regulate broadband access as being a utility,” he said. “Because that����ap how we got phone service to everybody. It was regulated. This isn’t.”

With that in mind, the main role the broadband office plays is working with service providers in rural areas. Neal-Graves and his team encourage providers to apply for federal grants, provide them with data and write letters of support to back their funding requests.

It’s a strategy that acknowledges the state’s internal efforts alone won’t be able to bridge the gap between 87% and 100% service in rural areas. The Department of Local Affairs’ has doled out $25 million in “middle mile” infrastructure grants since 2010, according to the broadband office. The Department of Regulatory Agencies’ “last mile” grants that help bring service directly to customers have helped 17,000 households get connected since 2016. But big federal support and major private sector investment is needed to traverse Colorado’s remaining vast distances.

“With all the money that the state has tried to put into this problem, it’s not enough. It����ap not going to be enough,” Neal-Graves said. “We’ve estimated that it is probably going to be somewhere north of $300 million to completely get to 100%.”

Mapping the problem

The state draws some of its broadband support funding from what’s called the “high-cost support mechanism,” a fee assessed on telecom providers in the state (and passed on to consumers on their bills). After years of tangling with reform, the fee — once dedicated solely to improving the reach of phone service — is slowly being redirected toward broadband funding. Beginning in 2019, it was expected to gin up $115 million over five years for projects.

That pales in comparison with the size of its federal counterpart, the Federal Communications Commission-run Universal Service Fund. Also fed by fees that pop up on Americans’ phone bills, the pool is billions of dollars deep and the FCC has used it to fund a variety of programs aimed at improving American internet access.

Its latest effort is called the . It’s a $20.4 billion renewal and expansion of the agency’s existing Connect America Fund program, FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said.

The FCC is writing rules for the program now, but the initial plan is to dole out the money via two rounds of reverse auctions where providers bid on funding: $16 billion in the first wave and the remaining $4 billion plus later. The first grants will likely be awarded in 2021.

There’s a big problem, according to critics, and it’s one the FCC freely admits: The agency’s existing service mapping data is terrible. The problem, Neal-Graves said, is that the agency measures service by the census block. If even one building gets broadband, the FCC classifies an entire block as served. In Colorado, where census blocks can be hundreds of square miles, it’s too broad to be accurate and leaves households out in the cold.

There have been calls by some for the FCC to hang onto the money until better mapping data — something the agency is pursuing now — becomes available. So far, those calls aren’t working.

“There is a desire not to wait and withhold support for areas that we know are entirely unserved,” Wigfield said. Let’s “move forward on areas we know lack service and then begin using this better data as we have it.”

A scattershot federal approach

Frazier and the people he serves in Dove Creek don’t need to wait for the FCC.

A Utah-based provider, , has been approved for a $2.7 federal grant to extend its fiber optic network 25 miles across the state line to bring the town internet capable of gigabit-per-second speeds. Emery is expected to serve more than 500 households, 20 farms and ranches, 15 businesses, .

The U.S. Department of Agriculture ponied up that grant. The agency received $600 million from Congress in March 2018 to put toward broadband efforts under its .

Emery chief operations officer Jared Anderson said the Dove Creek project will cost $3.6 million, with his company pitching in the final $900,000 and change. Emery, which got its start as a nonprofit phone service cooperative because Bell Telephone Co. wouldn’t serve the rural Utah in the 1950s, has five years to complete the Dove Creek project under the terms of its grant, Anderson said.

The incoming network is critical the small town’s economy, Frazier believes. He said the town has struggled to hang on to residents because quality internet service is hard to come by, making it challenging to run a business that requires any sort of online data filing. As he puts it, “You’ve gotta make money to eat, folks.”

Park, the Western Colorado University communications professor, said numerous studies, including some she has worked on, show that areas with better broadband generate more jobs and more startup companies. The impact of recessions is also less severe in those places.

Dolores County has the worst broadband access in the state, according to , a consumer advocacy site. Just 12.9% of people there get it.

“It’s going to be a big help,” Frazier said of the incoming fiber. “It helps our business stay here and also attract new businesses.”

The Dove Creek project does two things that Neal-Graves likes: It creates service provider choice in an underserved area and it brings in physical fiber, the most reliable broadband delivery method.

But it also highlights the federal government’s jigsaw-puzzle approach to rural broadband. The courthouse and school in Dove Creek already had fiber access from a previous federal subsidy, Frazier said. For homes and business to get it though, a Utah company had to apply for a USDA grant and get letters of support from the town and state officials.

“One of the things we are trying to encourage the federal government to think about is can you have a more holistic approach to this,” Neal-Graves said.

When asked why the FCC doesn’t coordinate its efforts with the USDA, Wigfield said, “that probably would be a question more for Congress.”

Haves and have-nots

At least one rural Colorado broadband provider is singing the praises of the FCC’s recently rolled out Alternative Connect America Cost Model. It’s a Universal Service Fund-fed mechanism for supporting providers in areas where service is too costly to provide without help.

Terry Hendrickson, the CEO and general manager of the Wiggins Telephone Association, said the predictable, model-based funding his company will receive from the FCC over the next 10 years will put it in a great position to serve more people on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. A prior, variable, year-to-year model that was offered starting in 2016 had the company worried it might not be able to pay its debts and serve its customers if it has accepted.

In a demonstration of just how little competition there is outside of the state’s urban areas, Wiggins Telephone is the sixth largest broadband provider in the state, according to an analysis by media research group Kagan earlier this year. It serves around 7,100 customers. Comcast, the state’s biggest provider, serves 1.15 million.

Through the augmented, and optional, FCC subsidy program the company, which provides high-speed internet under the trade name Blue Lightning, will receive $29.4 million over a decade. In return, the FCC is requiring the company to bring broadband service to 2,028 new locations; most in Weld and Morgan counties.

“We did a lot of research where we stood on these buildout obligations, and we’re in great shape,” Hendrickson said. “We’re in an area that’s experienced a lot of residential growth. Oil and gas has been very good for us.”

All told, Wiggins Telephone, has about 1,100 miles of fiber, Hendrickson said. Its crews were burying more along a highway north of Wiggins this month. The network, first built in 2008, was the result of an $18.3 million loan from the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service.

Even in the same region of the state there are haves and have-nots when it comes to broadband. State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg operates a ranch about 7 miles outside Sterling, a high plains town about an hour drive from Wiggins. If he has a piece of equipment break down and needs to access an online manual, Sonnenberg’s only hope on the ranch is internet service beamed from towers operated by his cellphone service provider, .

“It’s the only place I can get it,” he said, noting Viaero provides internet in areas including his corner of the state, western Nebraska and the San Luis Valley, sparsely populated places “no one else wanted.”

Sonnenberg co-sponsored the 2018 bill that redirects high-cost support mechanism money to broadband buildout. So far, he said, the state is only dealing with low-hanging fruit. Projects will only get more expensive as the spaces between customers get larger.

“It’s the cost. It’s absolutely the cost,” he said of the barriers to 100% access. “When you put in fiber or put in a line you distribute that cost between so many customers. When you get to rural areas of the state that have very small populations, the cost is divided across a fewer number. That’s quite frankly why most companies don’t serve those areas now.”

Sonnenberg’s home internet service isn’t broadband speed by federal definition, but he said he can live with it. The increasing pace of technological advancement should make future broadband projects cheaper, he said, but lightning-fast service won’t just appear overnight.

“I think this is one of those things that just takes time,” he said. “We’re going to have to be patient a little bit and allow it to happen.”

Eventually, new satellite broadband services and more fiber-to-the-home connections should allow rural communities to catch up later in the 2020s — until the next wave of innovation comes along.

“The problem is there is a moving target with broadband. It becomes a difficult prospect for rural areas to catch up,” said Ian Olgeirson, a research director with Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Colorado has made big strides in boosting broadband coverage, which the Federal Communications Commission defines as 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds. But much of the northern Front Range is on the doorstep of affordable 1 gigabit per second service (Gbps), which is 40 times faster.

“There will always be disparity,” acknowledges Tony Neal-Graves, executive director of Colorado’s Broadband Office.

The problem is fundamentally an economic one. If providers could make money serving rural areas with faster broadband speeds, they would do so. But rolling out new technology can be harder to justify where potential customers are scarcer.

Take the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G. The fastest version of 5G, operating on millimeter wavelengths, promises download speeds of 1-gig to 2-gig and the ability to handle dozens of devices in a home with almost no lag.

But Verizon Wireless, which is installing a 5G system in Denver, is focusing exclusively on the most densely populated neighborhoods, like downtown. It will take several years to reach the suburbs, and it remains uncertain if more remote areas will ever see the fastest version of 5G technology.

For starters, the millimeter band is fast but its signals can’t travel far, only 50 to 300 yards. That’s a major complication given the wider distances to cover in rural areas. Carriers must install multiple closely-spaced antennas, which is more expensive and only makes sense right now in more densely-populated areas.

And to haul the signals out, abundant fiber-optic capacity is needed, something many rural communities still lack.

“5G is very reliant on fiber to the site,” Eric Fradette, Verizon network system performance director, said during an interview in May.

Rural areas will get 5G, but a much slower and lower frequency version able to carry signals long distances. The technology, while it will be an improvement over current speeds, is not one that will bridge the digital divide.

On Dec. 2, T-Mobile flipped the switch on what it described as the first nationwide 5G network, covering more than 200 million people, 5,000 cities and towns, and 1 million square miles. That’s about 60% of the country’s population, but under a third of its geographic territory.

T-Mobile, as part of its efforts to merge with Sprint, made a pact with the federal government to cover 97% of the country with 5G wireless service within three years and 99% within six years.

T-Mobile said some of the less populated Colorado communities covered in the initial launch this month include Antonito, Arriba, Burlington, Clifton, Dolores, Fort Garland, Fruitvale, Haxton, Holly, Hotchkiss, Ignacio, Lamar, Meeker, Poncha Springs, Rico, Saguache, Silverton, Springfield, Wolcott and Yampa.

But critics were quick to pounce, describing T-Mobile’s new 600 Megahertz network as more of a souped-up version of 4G LTE, the current standard, and not a game-changer. The new 5G network is providing speeds that are on average just 20% higher than what the current 4G LTE network is offering,.

That should meet the current FCC definition of broadband, but it isn’t anywhere close to what Verizon, AT&T and even T-Mobile are looking to bring to urban neighborhoods via millimeter wave.

As part of the $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, Dish Network, based in Douglas County, said this July it would build a new 5G network from the ground up to replace Sprint as the nation’s fourth wireless carrier.

Dish isn’t ready to talk in detail about its rural broadband strategy. The company wrote the FCC in July and said it will put in 15,000 5G sites across the country and build a network reaching 70% of the U.S. population by June 14, 2023.

And it is pledging download speeds of at least 35 Mbps, above the current FCC definition of broadband.

But here’s the rub: 5G wireless speeds of 1,000 Mbps are around the corner for downtown Denver residents, and that could rise severalfold in the years ahead.

“We are very early on in this technology. It will continue to evolve and get faster,” Fradette said.

Rural users, assuming they are within reach of a cellular tower, will get a version of 5G at around 35 Mbps, which will also increase over time, but fall far short of what cities will have.

For rural areas, any kind of improvement, even if incremental, is welcome, said Kevin Hasley, executive director of performance benchmarking at IHS Markit.

“It will be fast enough,” he said of even the slowest versions of 5G wireless, at least initially.

But as has happened every other time speeds and capacity have increased, applications are developed to take advantage of the additional bandwidth. Uses now unimagined will eventually become viewed as indispensable, such as ride-hailing on a mobile device, which 4G wireless made possible.

To download a high-definition movie with 4 gigabytes of data would take about 23 minutes at the speeds defined as broadband in rural America, according to the .

For someone at the 5G download speeds that Dish has pledged, it would take a little more than 16 minutes. For a city dweller with 1-gig available through the fastest version of 5G, hybrid-cable or fiber optic, it would take 34 seconds.

And it isn’t about streaming movies and video games. Fast 5G wireless is expected to make it easier for self-driving cars to become established and for homes to have multiple devices, sensors and appliances all connected to the Internet.

If rural areas can’t accommodate those new uses, they will fall further behind. And repeated studies have found a direct correlation between broadband connectivity and the ability of rural counties to remain economically relevant.

“Only the most connected counties were able to stave off population declines,” note Jeremy Hegle and Jennifer Wilding, who authored a from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Fiber has miles to go

Although 5G could widen the digital divide in Colorado and elsewhere, lower costs for installing fiber-optic technology are making it more feasible to deploy high-speed connections directly to homes and businesses in rural communities.

Graves said about 80% of the applications to the state seeking broadband funding in rural areas now include a fiber solution. But lower costs are also driving a push to install fiber deeper into metropolitan neighborhoods, and there is no doubt who is going to win that race.

Comcast is the state’s largest residential broadband provider, covering about 63% of homes in Colorado, according to Kagan. Behind it is CenturyLink, the state’s incumbent telephone provider, with a 26% market share.

Comcast estimates that its local customers now have speeds ranging from 60 Mbps to 500 Mbps. In 2017, Comcast unveiled 1-gig service in metro Denver, claiming “this changes everything.”

“We are the nation’s largest Gig Internet provider, and 10-gig symmetrical speeds are part of our technology road map. Through our network, we have regularly increased speeds for customers at no additional cost,” said Leslie Oliver, a local spokeswoman for the company.

Comcast uses a hybrid of fiber optic and coaxial cables to supply most of its Colorado customers, who are concentrated primarily in the northern Front Range and the Interstate 70 corridor. Much of its gains have come at the expense of CenturyLink, the incumbent telephone provider, which has relied heavily on DSL, a slower copper-line technology.

“Operators who have a legacy DSL delivery have seen consistent declines and subscriber losses to the cable competition,” Olgerison said. “CenturyLink is no exception to that rule.”

Because CenturyLink is the only telecommunications provider in large swaths of Colorado, losing customers, whether for telephone service or broadband, leaves it less able to invest in the rural markets it serves.

But don’t count CenturyLink out just yet. Block by block, it is laying down fiber in neighborhoods across metro Denver and Boulder. It plans to add 46,000 homes and 1,300 businesses by early next year, providing them with 1-gig speeds for a flat $65 per month.

“We are going to keep building fiber in the metro area. Everything starts with density. You can get more homes passed with your dollar,” said Chris Denzin, CenturyLink’s vice president of consumer sales.

CenturyLink is starting with 1-gig because that is plenty fast and a number that residential customers can wrap their heads around. Eventually, equipment upgrades could allow it to boost speeds tenfold or even hundredfold. The key is putting in the fiber connection.

CenturyLink has been installing residential fiber since late 2013 in metro Denver, mostly in new communities, Denzin said. But the installation of 5G is helping fund the deployment of fiber deeper into existing neighborhoods.

Wireless carriers need the capacity, but CenturyLink benefits by being in a position to better compete with Comcast and the wireless carriers.

A . That’s down from 20% in 2018, but the faster speeds promised with 5G could accelerate that trend, unless wired providers can offer a more compelling product.

Expanding fiber coverage in rural communities is a tougher problem to crack, especially without demand from 5G carriers to build one out. But running fiber to the home could provide a more “future-proof” solution than other technologies.

“Are we doing enough to get enough fiber in the state,” asked Graves, who describes that as his top concern.

As CenturyLink gives more of metro Denver 1-gig speeds via fiber, it still struggles to provide download speeds of 10 Mbps in part of rural areas in Colorado using DSL, which depends on copper lines.

The CenturyLink upgrades are heavily subsidized under a federal grant program called the Connect America Fund II that provides $26 million a year in Colorado.

When DSL is nearby the fiber-optic network, download speeds can top 100 Mbps, said Guy Gunther, director of consumer fiber markets at CenturyLink, in an email. But that isn’t the reality on the ground in many places, where 10 Mbps is the norm.

Gunther is hopeful that the proposed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, the next big FCC grant program, will help boost download speeds to 25 Mbps in the most disadvantaged areas. At the same time, CenturyLink will keep adding more direct fiber connections in urban areas at 1,000 Mbps.

Just as with 5G, the growing number of fiber-to-the-home connections in metro neighborhoods will widen the digital divide.

Satellites to the rescue?

Rural Colorado may have to look up to the heavens for an answer to not being left behind yet again. Two weeks after T-Mobile announced it had lit up a slower version of 5G to cover broad swaths of the country, the FCC unveiled a grant to .

Through the CAF program, the FCC awarded $87.1 million to satellite broadband provider Viasat and others to help subsidize monthly bills to 123,000 underserved rural homes and businesses in 21 states.

Colorado’s allocation included $7.2 million to Viasat to subsidize monthly broadband bills for up to 6,517 locations in Colorado over the next six years.

But as with T-Mobile, critics raised concerns. Viasat’s service is considered slower, more costly and more restrictive on data usage. It is a “last-ditch” option for those with nothing else available, according .

Signals must travel high up, about 22,000 miles. The lag times or latency are severalfold higher than rival technologies, which can make gaming and video conferencing unworkable. By contrast, the fastest versions of 5G will have latency low enough that surgeons can operate on patients using robots located hundreds of miles away.

In its defense, Viasat is launching new satellites in 2021 and 2022 to boost both capacity and the speeds on its network. But they will remain way up there.

Satellite alternatives with faster speeds and less latency are in the works. SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos plan to seed the skies with thousands of low-earth orbit satellites rapidly traveling 300 miles to 1,200 miles up.

SpaceX’s Starlink project, which has applied to launch 12,000 satellites, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, with 3,236 satellites planned, are taking advantage of lower rocket launch costs and breakthroughs in small satellite technology. A third provider called OneWeb is also looking to launch hundreds of satellites.

Starlink can seed 60 satellites per launch and expects to complete enough launches to start selling broadband commercially in the U.S. by mid-2020. Musk sent his first tweet about the network in October.

Eventually, Starlink claims it will provide speeds of 1-gig, which would make it competitive with faster 5G and fiber-to-the-home, at least initially.

Putting aside concerns about polluting the sky with “fake stars” or the potential of creating a pinball alley of space junk, the new satellite networks could finally provide a lower cost and high-speed alternative reaching every “unreachable” corner.

“Americans who currently have no wired providers, or no providers at all, will have access to high-performing internet, bridging the digital divide and bringing around 10 million Americans up to speed with the rest of the nation,” .

And competition means lower prices. Two low-earth orbit satellite networks could save U.S. consumers, both rural and urban, $30 billion a year. If only one actually makes it, the savings would be closer to $18 billion, BroadbandNow estimates.