Longmont to accelerate buildout of gigabit fiber-optic network

Southwest Longmont is moving to the front of the line for access to the city’s gigabit fiber-optic network.

City of Longmont officials announced at Tuesday night’s city council meeting that due to high demand they will be accelerating the buildout of the network, with the aim of cutting several months from the original timeline.

Rather than building out the NextLight network in one counterclockwise sweep around the city starting at the south end of town, the city is adding manpower to work in two different directions, eventually “closing the circle” at the north end of town.

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Phase 1 of the buildout began in August, with the first customers receiving service in November. Phase 6 — the southwest part of town — was scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2017. But under the new plan, work will begin on both Phases 2 in central Longmont and Phase 6 by early April this year. Phase 3 in east Longmont will now start in June, and Phase 5 in northwest Longmont will now begin in November, with the final phase, Phase 4 in north Longmont, slated to start in early 2016 as originally planned.

“Our schedule was already aggressive, but we’ve heard repeatedly that our community is eager to receive high-quality, high-speed broadband,” Longmont Power and Communications general manager Tom Roiniotis said in a press release from the city. “So we’re accelerating the deployment.”

Longmont voters in 2011 passed a ballot measure granting the city permission to create a municipal broadband network. In 2013, voters approved a $45.3 million bond issue to build out the network.

The NextLight network offers residential Internet customers access to 1-gigabit-per-second download and upload speeds for a lifetime charter member rate of $49.95 per month. That’s nearly seven times faster than incumbent provider Comcast’s fastest tier in the area, 150 megabits-per-second for $114.95 per month according to the company’s website. It’s 50 times faster than the 20 megabits-per-second CenturyLink offers new customers for $29.95 per month.

Roiniotis said LPC will already be building significant additions to the electric system in southwest Longmont to accommodate new development in the area, so it made sense to add the new fiber infrastructure at the same time.

“Now that the weather is getting better, and we have access to additional trained fiber deployment crews, we will be able to substantially speed up our rate of deployment,” Roiniotis said.