Build out status - summer 2019

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As of June 1, we are suspending the creation of additional tower sites in the city limits of Golden - with very few exceptions. This is being done for two reasons:

  1. The City is currently exploring municipal broadband (ie fiber). It is difficult for us to invest $10,000's into new tower sites when they have a potentially short lifespan.

  2. We are hitting technological limitations on the frequencies our radios use to service single family homes. We use the same WiFi channels that you use inside your house for us to service you. This is currently the only available frequency space available in the US to use at these distances. It is getting very crowded and full of noise due to the sheer number of devices that are competing for airtime both in your homes and outside. You are likely noticing this with your current Internet provider when you use WiFi and we are experiencing it trying to service you.

That being said, for the past year, we have been using brand new technology (5G technology) in the downtown area to service condo, apartment and businesses along Washington Ave and surrounding streets. This is working very well and we are able to provide near gigabit speeds to those properties. Our growth in the foreseeable future will be using this new technology. The downside of this new tech is we can only go about 500 meters from the tower before the signal fades. Our normal towers are typically much further than that (up to 3 miles) from your house so we can't simply start upgrading our current towers and service you.

We do add new customers as we loose existing customers off tower sites. However, our "churn" rate is lower than 1%. That means people tend to only leave us when they move away. We are extremely proud of this. That is an unprecedentedly low churn rate for our industry and we take great pride in our network and customer service. However, it is not great news for those that are trying to get service from us.

I wish this was a problem we could solve with money or people but the two reasons listed above are not able to be overcome easily. Even if the city decided not to do municipal broadband (which it may not), we would still not be building new towers due to the second reason. Radio vendors are working on new technologies to service single family homes reliably using frequencies outside of the WiFi band but we are not there yet and probably won't be for at least a year.