Local governments are pooling their resources to buy better broadband via project THOR, reported Vail Daily.
Project THOR is the brainchild of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments and it has two main goals:
- To make broadband better and faster across Northwest Colorado’s rural areas, providing 100 GB service.
- To improve the reliability of the regional broadband network, which is currently prone to mass failures when a fiber line goes down in a single place.
According to Jon Stavney, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, the regional broadband system needs “resilience,” the ability to reroute itself so it keeps operating. In addition to local government funding, Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs is contributing $1 million in startup funding.
“That money will reduce participating jurisdictions’ by 50 percent,” Stavney said. Regarding the timeline, Stavney said the goal is to make Project THOR available by September 1. “We’ve been talking about it for more than five years. We’ve been intensely working on it for a year and a half. We’re going to make 2019 the year it happens,” he said.
Better fiber optic cable could also improve cell reception around the region as well. The Project THOR network loop is slated to impact 233,000 citizens across Northwest Colorado, reported Vail Daily. Stavney also hopes other communities that have the infrastructure already built will participate in THOR to provide resilience, lower costs and increase bandwidth. Comments? Email Us
January 7, 2019
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