Less than a year after the voters of Fort Collins approved a bond to build a citywide broadband infrastructure, plans are now being reviewed for when the project will begin.
The bond ballot question in November, which passed with 57 percent of the vote, asked to give the Fort Collins City Council permission to “establish a telecommunications utility to provide broadband services.”
Two months later, the council voted to officially move ahead with a project that will see the building of high speed, next-generation fiber throughout the city, including on the Fort Collins campus of Colorado State University.
In addition, the City of Fort Collins issued a Request for Proposals for the engineering, design and marketing of the new system, to be called Connexion.
The project has now taken an important step forward with Fort Collins’ successful selling of the $142 million in bonds needed to fund the ambitious project.
Where exactly the first segments of the new network will be built remains to be determined, but city officials have said they hope to see work begin on part of the infrastructure by next year, with the entire project completed sometime in 2021.
By Garry Boulard
