Last year, Timnath, Colorado broke ground on a new $20 million fiber network with the goal of dramatically expanding affordable fiber access to the town of 7,100 residents. Now the municipality has announced that they’ve lit up their very first subscriber in partnership with the city of Loveland’s Pulse Fiber municipal broadband network.
The City of Loveland, which is about 15 miles south of Timnath, launched Pulse Fiber in 2018. The city completed the $110 million deployment to the city of 77,000 in late 2023, coming in on time and under budget.
Inspired by Pulse, the Town of Timnath entered into an intergovernmental revenue-sharing agreement with Loveland’s ISP in August of 2023. Tinmath receives 25 percent of the network’s gross income, with an expected 2 to 6 percent return on capital investment over 20 to 30 years. The network is expected to be paid off in 25 years.
Network construction began last fall. The first phase of network construction is expected to take between six and nine months. Full construction of the network is expected to take between three and five years, though “hundreds” of town residents can sign up for service now.
The network’s first subscriber is Dean Contracting, a local construction firm that had long been dissatisfied with broadband access in the town.
“Fast, reliable internet isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity for everything we do,” Dean Contracting owner Lisa Dean told NOCO Style.
Tinmath’s deployment was heavily funded by the town’s capital improvement funds, which were in turn bolstered by broadband grants received via the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
In deployed markets, Pulse provides locals with five tiers of service: symmetrical 250 megabit per second (Mbps) for $60 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $75 a month; symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month; symmetrical 3 Gbps service for $150 a month; and symmetrical 10 Gbps service for $200 a month.
Pulse and Timnath join a growing parade of popular municipal broadband deployments in the Centennial State, ranging from LongMont’s Nextlight to Fort Collins’ Connexion.
Such efforts were emboldened last year by the state’s removal of counterproductive state restrictions against community broadband, lobbied for by regional telecom monopolies.
There are still 16 states that currently have some kind of state law either banning community broadband or greatly restricting the funding and expansion of such networks.
