Big Cable may have felled Seattle’s mayor, but it couldn’t stop this Colorado Project

In 2009, Vince Jordan was one of a handful of Coloradans hoping to flip the switch on a next-generation fiber optic network in his area. Longmont's 17-mile loop of fiber would have been capable of connecting Jordan to the Web at speeds 100 times faster than the national average. The city owned the cables already. All it needed was approval from the city's voters. But Jordan, the broadband manager for Longmont's public electric utility, failed to anticipate one thing: The cable companies.

"We got creamed," he says. "We lost by 12 [percentage points] in that vote." Flash forward to Election day 2013: Longmont residents approved a $45.3 million bond issuance that will go toward funding a city-wide fiber network. Longmont's plan explicitly bars the use of tax money to pay off the bonds. Instead, it will rely solely on revenues from broadband customers. What Longmont's experience shows is how large the gulf is between an incumbent industry that can spend money on a massive scale to promote its interests and advocates of municipal fiber that often lack deep-pocketed allies. Those odds made the triumph of Longmont's municipal fiber backers all the more remarkable.