Energy, Utilities & Water  March 25, 2015

Accelerated broadband build-out won’t cost Longmont extra

LONGMONT — The accelerated build-out of Longmont’s municipal broadband network will not increase the cost to the city, an official confirmed Wednesday.

The city had announced at Tuesday’s city council meeting that it was speeding up the rollout of its ultra-fast fiber-optic network, with some areas of town now slated to have access to the service several months ahead of schedule.

“Our contracts with our contractors are based on the work that they do, not the rate at which they do it,” Longmont Power and Communications’ general manager, Tom Roiniotis, said in a phone interview.

The speedier build-out will be made possible because TCS Communications LLC, which is building the Longmont network, will be nearly doubling the number of workers on the project.

TCS recently finished a similar project in Taos, N.M., freeing up crews from that project to come to Longmont. David Dawson, project manager for TCS in Longmont, said the company has about 30 people working on Longmont’s build-out now, including administrative staff. About 25 of those people are in the field. He said that over the next couple of months about 20 more field workers would be added.

“If we need to add more, that’s what we’ll do,” Dawson said.

Longmont is building out its network in six phases and originally had planned to complete the network sometime in 2017. But with Phase 1 in south Longmont about 90 percent done, the target now is to have the final phase of construction begin in early 2016.

Part of the reason the city jumped at the chance to add more workers and accelerate the timeline is the early response it has seen from residents in the Phase 1 area. The city offers its 1-gigabit Internet service for $49.95 per month to residents who sign up within a three-month period of when the city first offers the service to them.

The Phase 1 build-out began in August, and the first 433 homes were offered the service in early November. With the three-month “charter member” period now passed for that group, about 45 percent of those households have subscribed. The city is targeting 37 percent penetration within five years of the entire city being built out in order to meet financial obligations.

The increased subscription rate caused the city some issues early on with not having enough crews to hook households up to the service. While TCS is building out the broader network, the city of Longmont’s NextLight utility actually connects homes to the service. The city has since hired and trained more installation crews to help keep up with demand as new areas of the city are built out by TCS.

As of last Thursday, the city had 3,298 households and businesses capable of receiving the service, though it hasn’t yet marketed it to all of those. A total of 711 customers have signed up for service so far.

“This has been significantly more demanding than we anticipated,” Roiniotis said. “That’s a great problem to have, but that’s something we had to make an adjustment with in this first phase.”

If the current rate of subscriptions keeps up, Roiniotis said it’s conceivable that the city could use some of the extra revenue to pay off its bond debt used to build the network early. But he said that revenue could also be used for things like future system upgrades, noting that, while the 1-gigabit service offered today is vastly superior to what is offered in town by companies like CenturyLink and Comcast, the same might not be true four or five years from now.

Rather than conducting the build-out in a counterclockwise sweep around the city starting at the south end, the city is now planning to work in both directions before “closing the circle” at the north end of town.

Phase 2 of the rollout in central Longmont is slated to begin in early April along with Phase 6 in southwest Longmont, the latter of which was originally slated to begin in early 2017. Phase 3 in east Longmont, originally slated to begin in the third quarter of this year, is now slated to start in June, while Phase 5 in northwest Longmont has been moved up to begin construction in November. Phase 4 in north Longmont remains slated for a construction start in early 2016.

In addition to the number of install crews needed, the city has learned other tidbits about the rollout along the way. For instance, the moving up of Phase 3 is planned in part due to the fact that Phase 2 has a lot of overhead wires rather than underground. The city has learned during Phase 1 that the build-out goes quicker in such areas.

Such scenarios are also why the city isn’t committing to specific service availability dates for any area of town, Roiniotis said, particularly since each phase kind of has to be designed as things move along.

But Dawson, the TCS project manager, said Longmont’s new accelerated timeline is doable.

“As long as the weather is good, it should be fine,” Dawson said. “And we’re going into summer.”

LONGMONT — The accelerated build-out of Longmont’s municipal broadband network will not increase the cost to the city, an official confirmed Wednesday.

The city had announced at Tuesday’s city council meeting that it was speeding up the rollout of its ultra-fast fiber-optic network, with some areas of town now slated to have access to the service several months ahead of schedule.

“Our contracts with our contractors are based on the work that they do, not the rate at which they do it,” Longmont Power and Communications’ general manager, Tom Roiniotis, said in a phone interview.

The speedier build-out will be…

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