Although Colorado Springs residents have enjoyed fast internet for years, those in outlying areas such as Black Forest and unincorporated Falcon have struggled with slower speeds. Now a Limon-based rural electric cooperative is looking to change that.

Mountain View Electric Association plans to spend $190 million during the next five years to extend fiber-optic internet service capability to all 51,000 members in its eight-county service area, which includes rural parts of El Paso County.

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The plan is the largest initiative to expand broadband service to a rural area in Colorado and among the largest in the nation, said Jonathan Chambers, a partner in Conexon, a Kansas City, Mo.-based company that is working with Mountain View to build out the 5,800-mile network. The companies have been working together to develop the plan since last summer and unveiled the details last week in the Black Forest area.

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The first customers are expected to be connected next spring and will have the option of 100 megabit-per-second service for $49.95 a month or 1 gigabit-per-second service for $79.95 a month, offered through Conexon Connect, Conexon’s newly formed internet service provider arm. The company, which specializes in working with rural electric cooperatives to offer fiber-optic broadband service, also will offer internet telephone and later expects to begin selling 2 gigabit-per-second broadband service.

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Amanda Hall, Mountain View’s manager for the fiber project, said the fiber-optic lines will be attached to the association’s utility poles or buried with its underground lines and will be financed through debt and grants. Mountain View plans to lease excess capacity to Conexon, so the project won’t result in higher electric rates for Mountain View members. The association covers parts of Arapahoe, Crowley, Douglas, Elbert, El Paso, Lincoln, Pueblo and Washington counties.

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“Rural areas have been left behind for large-scale infrastructure projects such as electric power, telephone and broadband because companies can’t make money doing it,” Chambers said.

“Our strategy is for the rural areas not to be behind urban areas (in internet speeds) but offer the same or better service in rural areas as what is available in urban areas. We aren’t just playing catch up; we want to catch up, then move ahead.”

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Chambers estimates up to 40% of Mountain View’s customers and about 80% of its service area do not have access to broadband service, and those that have such access can only get download and upload speeds that are a fraction of what is available in urban areas. That makes attending online classes, working from home or accessing online health services difficult or impossible for many residents of rural areas.

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“People realized during the pandemic that if they had the opportunity to work from home or access health care through online applications that it would be easier to live in rural areas where it is less expensive to live,” Chambers said. “We want to move beyond the concept of always hitting your head on the ceiling of your bandwidth and not having to worry about if you have enough for all of your devices.”

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Work on the project has begun with Conexon employees evaluating Mountain View’s utility poles to make sure they can support and have clearance from obstacles for the steel cable to which the fiber-optic lines will be attached. After the evaluation, Mountain View will replace any poles that don’t meet the requirements. When that process is complete, installation of fiber-optic lines will begin, though the two companies are studying which locations will get fiber-optic service first.

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Mountain View, which will own the fiber-optic network when the project is complete, will use the lines to monitor its distribution and transmission network so it can manage the power grid on “both sides of the meter,” Chambers said.

That makes the utility eligible for grants and long-term, low-rate loans from a variety of federal agencies and programs to finance the project, he said.

State and local officials have been looking for ways to expand broadband service to rural areas. Gov. Jared Polis this week signed into law House Bill 21-1289, sponsored by Reps. Chris Kennedy, D-Lakewood, and Mark Baisley, R-Roxborough Park, to make $75 million in federal stimulus funds available to build out the state’s broadband infrastructure.

The El Paso County commissioners developed a plan in 2019 that called for creating public-private partnerships to accelerate the availability of broadband service in rural areas. Mountain View and Conexon said they might seek help from El Paso County and other counties in its service area to finance the project.

Mountain View was started in 1941 as a member-owned cooperative to bring electric power to the six-county area. Nine years later, Mountain View’s board set up the Eastern Slope Rural Telephone Association in 1950 to get a federal loan to provide telephone service to customers in Arriba, Bennett, Eads, Flagler, Genoa, Haswell, Hugo, Karval, Kit Carson and Woodrow in east central Colorado. Mountain View has a major operations center in Falcon east of Colorado Springs.