The fiber optic cable ring taking shape in Cañon City will bring high-speed internet to government facilities, businesses and residents — boosting Fremont County’s efforts to become a technology center.
Funded by $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act grants and private investment from Gillette, Wyoming-based Visionary Broadband, the project will create a redundant loop and high-speed connections, Cañon City Economic Development Manager Rick Harrmann says. “It will also help our community compete with other communities for development.”
The city and county want to attract more tech companies and location-neutral professionals who can work anywhere, says Cañon City Administrator Ryan Stevens. Fremont County has had some success in doing that through the TechSTART project and the Emergent Campus.
Quality broadband is essential to growth in a rural economy, says Brad Rowland, Emergent Campus co-founder.
“Tech-based businesses don’t have the option to be offline,” Rowland says. “Our federal subcontractors are often required to have multiple providers to comply with their site requirements.”
These considerations led the city to craft an request for proposals for fiber internet, Stevens says, and an agreement with Visionary to construct and operate a fiber network was signed in early 2024.
The project’s first phase broke ground April 26, 2024, with the construction of the backbone infrastructure, which Visionary plans to complete by late 2025 before beginning two more phases to connect residences and businesses, Visionary CEO Brian Worthen says. All three phases are projected to be online by approximately the end of 2026.
Some parts of the initial structure already are functioning, and potential customers won’t have to wait until the project is completed to get service.
“We’re about a quarter of the way done,” Worthen says. “We have taken some areas live around the Justice Center, and those businesses can get online now. We made sure while we’re building that we have connectivity along that trunk line, and as we build additional footage, we can take those customers live every mile we build.”
The trunk line is designed to connect all of the city’s assets and serve high-security operations such as water and emergency services, as well as businesses and residences. The project’s redundancy is one reason city officials supported it.
Until now, Cañon City has relied on older technologies provided by Spectrum, Century Link and a few smaller cable and telecom companies, Stevens says.
“If one of their lines got severed, it would shut down the town,” he says. “All merchants on that line lost their ability to take credit cards.”
When the city crafted the RFP, he says, “we asked for the provider to have a diverse physical route. So, if one line gets severed, there’s still another line coming into the community.”
In addition, the city specified a carrier-neutral facility that would be built outside City Hall where other providers could pay to piggyback onto Visionary’s service and retain their connectivity.
Visionary was chosen for the project from among several bidders.
“They were already in the community, so we were familiar with them,” Stevens says.
“They were the most responsive to what we put in our bid, and they have a track record of doing this in rural communities.”
Visionary serves more than 120 communities from southern Montana to southwest Colorado, Worthen says.
“We describe ourselves as a Rocky Mountain company,” he says. “We started as an internet provider in 1994 with five phone lines in the basement of a house. We’re not new to the game.”
But Visionary is part of a new breed of fiber internet builders/owners/operators serving smaller, rural communities that don’t interest larger providers.
The availability of grants and loans in the past few years and post-COVID demand has spawned small, nimble builders like Visionary across the country, Worthen says.
“In our case, it was easy to pivot a lot of our staff towards fiber building,” he says.
In Colorado, Visionary provides fiber internet service in Gunnison, Kremmling, Lake City and Marble, and mobile phone service in several Colorado towns including Cortez, Durango, Eagle, Pagosa Springs, Telluride and Vail.
“Cañon City is a very strategic location for us and a great market from a fiber builder standpoint,” Worthen says, adding that the project’s positive impacts go beyond the services provided and make the company’s and city’s investments worthwhile.
“When you put fiber in the ground, you’re creating property tax, and then when you ship materials to a location, it creates sales tax to the local community,” he says. “Those are all wins, and Cañon City recognizes that, and that’s why it’s a good partnership. If I were to boil it down into two words, it’s future proofing.”
