Fiber-optical illusion: despite promises, the state's high-speed Internet connection falls short of expectations.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Q3 Tech Report

From the perspective of Aaron Brill, manager of the Silverton Mountain Ski Area, the digital divide in rural Colorado is 16 miles wide--the distance between his office and Cascade Village at Durango Mountain Resort.

Qwest Communication International's nearest fiber-optic cable dead-ends in Cascade Village, and an antiquated microwave linkup connects Silverton, the county seat of San Juan County, with the Internet and the outside world. The lack of reliable, high-speed Internet access in Silverton "cuts down on the efficiency of everything we do," says Brill--from processing online reservations to uploading marketing materials.

"It makes things that are simple in the real world very difficult here," he said. "We can't even have a Webcam."

And if an avalanche were to take out a relay tower--as one did in early 2005--no telecommunications can make it in or out of Silverton at all; no calls on cell phones or land lines, no faxes, e-mails, credit-card transactions, nothing.

"We only had dial-up Internet access here until two years ago," says Patrick Swonger, a Silverton town trustee and the owner of Vidion, an IT consulting firm in the 350-resi-dent town. "I'd venture to say we're the most isolated county seat in Colorado."

During the high-tech boom of the 1990s, the state promised every county seat a fiber-optic Internet connection, and three years ago Colorado was lauded as the first U.S. state to connect every county seat with a high-speed fiber-optic network. But the accolades were premature--or slightly exaggerated. Silverton has yet to get the connection.

Today critics across rural Colorado are saying the state's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished" for that network came much too early. The network is known by the acronym MNT--which stands for Multi-Use Network Task Force, a group that conceived the vision of the statewide fiber-optic network a decade ago. In the late '90s, the task force highlighted five principal goals for the MNT: to aggregate all state data communications on the network; to have the state serve as anchor tenant to the network; to enhance access to the Internet for the rural private sector; to promote rural economic development; and to improve educational opportunity through use of the network.

The job of making that vision a reality went out to bid, and, in 1999, US West won a $37 million contract from the state to build the network. Yet, even before ground was broken in 2000, complications arose. Critics argue that Qwest's high-profile courtship of US West and the following merger between the two companies bogged down progress on the MNT. That slowdown has a legacy, argues Clarke Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Rural Development Council. "By the time they got it built," says Becker, the MNT, "was already out of date." The network's speed varies geographically, but the slowest points are around I megabit per second, pokey by today's cable-modem standards.

State officials, however, defend the MNT and say the project has gone exactly to plan--or at least pretty close to plan. Critics of the operation, says Jonita Leroy of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, are getting a little ahead of themselves, asking from the network more than was originally planned. "The project was completed in October 2003," says Leroy, and because the network is up and running, it's a significant upgrade over the previous status quo in rural Colorado. Before the MNT, she points out, counties' separate and numerous providers of Internet services made for a statewide network that "was piecemealed together in a way that did not provide any network security at all," she says. The MNT, therefore, represents a significant upgrade for those counties, and Colorado was indeed the first state to lay fiber to every county.

Every county, yes, but not every county seat.

"It never happened," Swonger says. "What I want is what we were promised: a fiber-optic network to the county seat. [Qwest] went to where there were people with lots of money, and then they stopped."

Why Silverton was never connected to the MNT remains something of a mystery. State Rep. Mark Larson, R-Cortez, has been following the paper trail to find out who exactly excused Qwest from its contractual...