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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Fort Collins Municipal Network Celebrates 20,000 Subscriber Milestone
By
on
Fort Collins, Colorado has repeatedly won awards for being a trailblazer in the municipal fiber space, and local subscribers continue to take notice. The city-owned and operated Connexion network operation just announced it has passed the 20,000 subscriber mark, after nabbing a significant new wave of state and federal funding for expansion earlier this year.
Fort Collins began thinking about a citywide fiber deployment as early as 2012. By 2015, locals had voted to exempt the city from a counterproductive state law restricting communities from building their own broadband networks.
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Construction of the municipal network began in 2018. Subscribers began to connect to the network in 2019, and by 2023 fiber service was available to every last home and business in the city of 169,000.
Thanks to local leaders, city residents now have access to some of the fastest, most affordable broadband available anywhere, including symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $70 a month; symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month; and symmetrical 10 Gbps service for $200 a month. Connexion service comes with no usage caps or long-term contracts.
As part of its celebration of reaching 20,000 subscribers, Connexion officials say they will give away a year of free Internet access to 20 subscribers chosen at random.
To mark the occasion, Chad Crager, Executive Director of Fort Collins Connexion, said:
“As we reflect on this milestone, our focus is on the people and experiences that have shaped our journey. Reaching 20,000 customers is a testament to the trust the Fort Collins community has placed in us as their municipal broadband provider, and we wanted to give something back to the customers.”
Last year, Connexion’s success inspired broadband leaders statewide to successfully push for the repeal of SB152, a protectionist law passed in 2005 with lobbying support from Comcast and Centurylink (now Lumen) looking to undermine competition from community broadband.
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Late last year, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) awarded Connexion the Community Broadband Projects of the Year Award for delivering “better, more affordable Internet” to all 80,000 city homes and businesses.
Buoyed by its successes, Fort Collins has since started striking intergovernmental agreements with unserved neighboring communities in Larimer County in a bid to further extend affordable access to locals long-neglected by regional monopolies.
Those efforts are being aided by a new $10.7 ARPA/CPF grant to expand fiber service to 1,409 addresses in neighboring unincorporated areas of Poudre Park, Red Feather Lakes, and Rist Canyon – as well as an additional project expanding access to the Colorado State University Mountain Campus. Connexion maintains a section of its website dedicated to tracking ongoing deployments.
The city’s work has been utterly transformative, and has proven to be an inspiration to countless other U.S. communities struggling with substandard, unaffordable broadband access.
“We are excited about what the future holds and are committed to further enhancing our services and outreach,” Crager said. “This is just the beginning of our journey towards connecting every home and business in Fort Collins with reliable, affordable, high-speed Internet. Connexion is truly community-owned fiber Internet.”
*This story has been updated to correct a previous version which incorrectly stated the estimated population of Fort Collins.
Inline images courtesy of Fort Collins Connexion
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