Colorado Broadband Director Has a Pragmatic Approach to Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment

Colorado is a bit of an enigma. It’s home to numerous dense and high population areas including the Denver/Boulder metro area, Fort Collins to the north and Colorado Springs to the south. But, outside those metro areas of the eighth largest state geographically, there have been significant challenges to deploying internet service. Colorado’s challenges include mountains blocking lines of sight, a granite-rich topography that makes underground builds pricey, and sparsely populated desert plains on the West side of the state. Colorado is receiving $826.5 million in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding, a number that the state’s broadband director, Brandy Reitter, speculates was boosted because of the high-cost threshold for deployment in challenging topographies in the fiber-first program. As for how Colorado will define its own ‘high cost per location threshold,’ Reitter says her office is in the process of defining parameters and that Colorado will not be using a ‘one size fits all’ approach because the variety of topographies in the state makes deployment costs vary significantly.