Building the Rocky Mountain Middle Mile

Ten counties across Northwest Colorado joined together for Project Thor, an open access middle mile network dedicated to transport and built for resilience using a series of concentric loops covering nearly 18,000 square miles, with other providers leveraging Thor for delivering last-mile internet access to a quarter-million people in the region. Using a combination of dark fiber and agreement with existing carriers, Thor has dropped bandwidth costs from $1.10 to under 25 cents a megabit. Moving forward, Project Thor will be merged with the Region 10 fiber network on the western edge of Colorado bordering the state of Utah and provide additional resilience and more affordable connectivity to the communities in the region. The longer-term plan is to interconnect the set of publicly owned networks through the entire western half of Colorado, creating multiple fiber loops across the state and supplying broadband to more people and pushing the last mile further out. Funding for the open access middle mile networks is and will come from a combination of Colorado state and federal funding.