Middle Mile Infrastructure

Broadband capacity, reliability, and cost are dependent, in part, on middle mile infrastructure. The accompanying Google Earth KMZ file depicts those middle mile infrastructure assets we were able to identify during the study period. We know two things about this map:

1. There are more middle mile infrastructure assets in the region than we were able to identify during the study period.

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** We recommend the COG establish a mechanism to continually update and improve the data available on the map. This effort can be accomplished in conjunction with the Governor’s Office of Information Technology’s asset mapping effort. Rather than creating redundant efforts it would be prudent to work with GOIT to ensure the GOIT asset map meets the COG’s planning and management needs.

K1: Working with GOIT to improve regional broadband mapping.

We recommend the COG establish a mechanism to continually update and improve the data available on the map. This effort can be accomplished in conjunction with the Governor’s Office of Information Technology’s asset mapping effort. Rather than creating redundant efforts it would be prudent to work with GOIT to ensure the GOIT asset map meets the COG’s planning and management needs.

Identification of existing broadband assets is an iterative process involving conducting research and seeing assets in the field through a process we call cursory field verification. We describe many of our research methods in the “Research Notes” section of the “Sources” appendix.

We qualify our field verification as cursory because for the sake of this research we do not coordinate with asset owners to inventory and verify their infrastructure. We simply look for evidence of it in the areas our research indicates it should be. We also watch for probable broadband infrastructure throughout the region and research its ownership and purpose when we find it.

When we look for broadband assets in the region, we watch for buried infrastructure, aerial infrastructure, wireless infrastructure, supporting infrastructure, and signs of new construction.

Buried Infrastructure

When looking for buried infrastructure we are primarily looking for buried fiber. The best indicator of buried fiber is fiber route markers.

A Fiber Route Marker

Fiber route markers come in a variety of shapes. Most of them are orange or orange capped. Most fiber route markers indicate they mark a buried fiber path. It is important not to confuse fiber route markers with other buried infrastructure markers.

Aerial Infrastructure

It is often difficult to distinguish broadband aerial infrastructure form other more traditional infrastructure. On middle mile routes, aerial fiber can sometimes be distinguished by its position on the pole (usually at least two feet below power infrastructure or sometimes on a line attached at the very top of the pole). Middle mile aerial fiber is often characterized by a lack of insulators at pole attachment points. Much of the existing last mile telecommunications has or can be repurposed for use in broadband networks – given middle mile availability within attenuation distances (thus, the installation of supporting infrastructure).

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Aerial Fiber

Wireless Infrastructure

Wireless infrastructure is evident in cellular, microwave, and other wireless antennae.

Microwave Antennae

Cellular Antennae with Microwave Backhaul

Yagi style antennae – Broadband at the Home or Small Business

Supporting Infrastructure

Supporting infrastructure represents a lot of different facilities we see in the field. For example, VDSL usually requires a fiber to the node construction methodology which means we should find nodes in VDSL supported neighborhoods.

A VDSL node

New Construction

Buried fiber or broadband construction is characterized by bore machines, plows, and other specialized equipment and materials.

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Middle mile infrastructure can have a significant impact on capacity and cost but it plays a critical role in reliability.

On 31 October 2011 CenturyLink experienced an eight hour outage in northwest Colorado because of damage to its middle mile infrastructure near Dillon.

Figure 12: Area Affected by 31 October 2011 Middle Mile Outage

In public meeting with CenturyLink staff 12 December 2011, Steamboat Springs Resort Chamber of Commerce CEO, Tom Kern said of the October CenturyLink outage:

At the chamber, we estimate that outage cost our businesses $100,000 per hour in lost sales. If that outage had occurred between Christmas and New Years, it would be $1 million per hour. This must not happen again!

Lost sales were not the only effect of the outage. Productivity and public image were also both

tarnished. We can’t estimate the tourism cost of the tarnished image but we can speculate on the cost of lost productivity:

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Lost Sales Lost Productivity Total Cost of Outage $100,000/hour X 8 hours 1,000 workers X $30/hour X

8 hours

$800,000 $240,000 $1,040,000

Table 6: Steamboat Springs Middle Mile Outage Cost Estimate

Elsewhere in Colorado, a fiber cut in the San Luis Valley on August 14, 2010 took down all

telecommunications in the 6-county region for 14 hours. A similar outage occurred in January 2011 near Colorado City, which took the San Luis Valley off-line for many hours. As a result, the San Luis Valley Broadband Cooperative took measures to invite additional middle mile services to the region and they now enjoy 7 middle mile routes into the region.64 _{The FCC stopped making records of}

telecommunications network outages public in 2004. Colorado Public Utilities Commission offers no such record keeping or requirement of service providers.

Northwest Colorado has a reasonable amount of middle mile fiber infrastructure connecting most population centers in the region. Three critical weaknesses characterize the available middle mile fiber assets:

1. Redundancy

In aggregate, the fiber paths in the region offer good regional egress diversity. Paths exist through Vernal to Salt Lake City, through Rifle to Grand Junction, and along at least two geographically diverse routes to Denver. Taking into consideration microwave links as well, diversity is added to Cheyenne. Unfortunately, route diversity is largely owned by competing network owners and the competing network owners have not come to agreements to create diversity in their disparate networks by carrying each other’s traffic.

** We recommend working with the various network owners in the region to help them come to agreements to carry each other’s traffic. Several of the network owners in the region have expressed an interest in doing so. Failing to get service providers to enter into traffic sharing agreements, towns may pursue carrier neutral locations and create redundancy for themselves. Of course, the utility of a CNL is limited to its subscribers.

2. Access

Potential subscribers seem to have difficulty accessing the fiber in the region.

** We recommend establishing a regional information repository potential subscribers can turn to in order to learn about available middle mile infrastructure.

** There may also be a need to invest in building add/drop points on the existing middle mile fiber infrastructure. Network owners may need subsidies, business guarantees, or some other incentive to justify the business case for building and maintaining an add/drop location. 3. Cost

Middle mile data access prices are typically tiered with the cost per Mbps dropping dramatically as the volume of bandwidth purchased increases. However, Northwest Colorado is a rural area.

64 _{Service providers include: Viaero, GoJade Communications (2 routes), Skywerx, EAGLE-Net, and CenturyLink (2} routes)

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The data demands a given county or hospital put on middle mile infrastructure are limited. Disaggregated these customers seldom reach discount thresholds. Aggregating demand can serve to overcome some middle mile cost barriers.

** We recommend looking for opportunities and methods to aggregate demand.