We had a few frustrating hours here — at the little house I share with my daughter and her family, in historic downtown Pagosa Springs — when our internet service disappeared.
…Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?
A quick check with neighbors suggested that only our house was affected by the problem. Brushing the snow off the receiver didn’t help. Nothing to do but call our Internet Service Provider: Skywerx.
Several minutes later, the Skywerx technician, on the phone, reported that our receiver seemed to be working, but he was not able to access our router (from wherever he was.) Maybe we had a bad cable? Did I have a spare Ethernet cable I could try?
I used to have a whole box of Ethernet cables, from the days before WiFi. So did my daughter. But a frantic search through almost every corner of the house confirmed our fears — that we had both, long ago, disposed of these seemingly useless cables.
I called my friend, Cynda Green. Did she happen to have an Ethernet cable knocking around the house? No luck.
But Cynda had a suggestion. “Try the secondhand stores.”
A few minutes later, I was standing at the checkout counter at the Humane Society Thrift Store, holding a used Ethernet cable. 50 cents.
Took it home. Plugged it in. Presto, we had internet service again.
If only life were always so simple.
Late last summer, I noticed a crew of men and machines digging a trench in the roadside ditch along North 5th Street. The work — whatever the heck they were doing — seemed to be progressing slowly. From what I could tell, some kind of thick black cable was being laid about two feet deep along side the road. Here and there, small underground vaults were being sunk unto the earth, marked by short orange-capped posts.
Written on the posts were the words: “Warning: Buried Cable”
As summer faded into autumn, the crew moved up Cemetery Road, laying the same fat cable. Then another crew appeared along the Lewis Street alley that leads up to my house.
I became concerned about the work when my son-in-law was temporarily unable to use the alley to get home. A call to Town Hall revealed that the crews were laying fiber optic cable on behalf of CenturyLink, the company that used to provide phone service all around Pagosa Springs, before people switched to wireless smartphones.
(I believe only about half of the homes in Pagosa still use land-based phone lines?)
CenturyLink used to be called CenturyTel, but changed their name when they realized that the future of communications probably didn’t run though copper wires strung from telephone poles.
The fat cable being laid into the ground was about one inch in diameter, and appeared to contain a number of fiber strands.
What, exactly, was CenturyLink up to? This seemed like a pretty beefy cable to be running through a quiet, residential neighborhood. For those of you familiar with the northern half of downtown Pagosa, the homes are pretty modest. A fair number are modulars, or mobile homes. The largest buildings are the Section 8 low-income apartments belonging to Archuleta Housing Corporation.
Not exactly the type of neighborhood where I’d imagine an immediate need for a fat fiber optic cable.
And Cemetery Road? We need a new fiber optic cable to run past Hilltop Cemetery?
Here’s a little map showing — roughly — the path of the new cable, as perceived by an outside observer:
Downtown Pagosa is at the bottom right. My house is marked by a blue marker near the center of the map. Once the cable leaves the north Pagosa neighborhood and heads up Cemetery Road, it enters a rather rural ‘No Man’s Land,’ so to speak; I believe there are a total of five homes and one business along Cemetery Road that sit adjacent to this newly-laid cable.
Is CenturyLink trying to serve the community? Or are they just having fun laying expensive fiber optic cable where almost no one lives?
Questions to which I have no answers. But I do know that CenturyLink has been well subsidized by state and federal money to provide “service” to rural communities in Colorado. Here’s an excerpt from an article by reporter Greg Avery, writing in the Denver Business Journal in April 2018:
Colorado will commit an unprecedented $100 million over five years to bring high-speed internet to unserved rural areas under a bill signed into law and praised by political leaders Monday.
The law, backed by bi-partisan sponsors in the legislature, redirects money used to subsidize rural local phone service — the vast majority of it going to CenturyLink Inc. — and uses it for grants to companies proposing to build broadband infrastructure in unincorporated areas and small towns.
“This has been the focus of a lot of people for a lot of years,” said Gov. John Hickenlooper, noting that from his first moments in state politics he’d heard about the need for modern, high-speed Internet in rural Colorado. “You can’t really have a discussion about economic development unless you have that,” he said.
CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), the Monroe, Louisiana-based telecom that’s Colorado’s largest local phone provider, publicly supported shifting local phone subsidies to rural broadband. But it has misgivings about the details of the law and how quickly it will phase out subsidies that mean $30 million annually to the company.
CenturyLink had hoped “for a more rational way” to do it, said Mark Soltes, CenturyLink’s vice president of public affairs for Colorado. “We do support the goal of this transition,” he said. “You can do it in a way that’s not a shock to the system.”
According to Mr. Avery’s article, Colorado will need to spend an estimated $300 million to $400 million to extend broadband to “the roughly 150,000 Colorado households that lack usable high-speed internet.” That estimate came from Stephanie Copeland, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development, who prior to 2017 had been working in the telecom industry.
Was this curious fiber project along Cemetery Road funded by government subsidies?
A question that might bring us to discussion at the morning Archuleta Board of County Commissioners’ work session yesterday, January 2. The Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation has been spearheading an effort to line up government subsidies for broadband projects in Archuleta County…