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Reports from the state auditor seldom make for dynamic reading, but there is one that ought to be a campaign issue.
It was a performance audit of Colorado's Beanpole
Telecommunication Project.
The project had the worthy
goal of connecting all of Colorado, especially public
offices in the hinterlands, to a high-speed fiber-optic
network.
But as of last May, when the auditors wrote their final
report, we conclude that the Beanpole project has not
yet met its two main objectives of encouraging private
telecommunication vendors to offer services throughout the
Stae and connecting local public offices to the MNT on a
large scale.
The MNT is the Multi-use Network -- cable to every county seat. They were laying it around here last summer, and when I made inquiries, the answers sounded promising.
The state was paying Qwest $37 million to install the cable, and the state would contract for some of the capacity for use by governmental offices. Other capacity would be available to private vendors, who could offer broadband services to folks like me.
That's the MNT. Project Beanpole is related but different. Beanpole gave planning and implementation grants to local governments so that they could figure out their combined telecommuniction needs, and then come up with a way to pipe them all together to the MNT.
Think of MNT as a big highway, and of Beanpole as the on- and off-ramps, and you've got the idea. Then add the other ramps that private parties might provide.
This sure sounded good last year in a press release from
the Colorado Technology Alliance. It quoted one Jackie
Slate, who was identified as Qwest's senior network account
manager for government and education services: New
businesses looking at moving to Colorado can ber assured of
getting tyhe leading-edge high-speed network connections
required in today's business environment, not only in metro
areas but in any community across Colorado.
The only thing that we've actually been assured of is giving money to Qwest and getting nothing in return. To put this another way, the MNT is the reverse of our traditional industry of mining.
When you mine, you dig up the earth and remove valuable materials so that you can use them. With MNT, you dig up the earth and bury valuable materials so that no one uses them.
Colorado paid Qwest $37 million to install MNT. According to the auditors, the state also paid Qwest $1.4 million for capacity on MNT during the past fiscal year.
And what are we getting for our money? According to the
May, 2002, audit, only one Beanpole recipient .. had
connected to the MNT,
although two other recipients
should connect at least some of their public offices to the
MNT by July 2002.
Thus, the low number of public offices connected to
the MNT to date brings into question whether local public
offices will use the MNT over the long-term.
One reason for that low number is that we don't know
how to connect to it,
according to Jeff Blondeau, who
handles technology for Salida's public schools. I've
tried to find just what we need to do, and I can't get an
answer anywhere.
The school district gets a broadband connection through
a private vendor, just as Saguache County does, according
to Peggy McIntosh, the county administrator. I know
they ran the cable through here,
she told me, but it
was cheaper and easier for us to use a microwave
connection.
Our state government helped Qwest pay for this cable, and the state pays Qwest for capacity it doesn't come close to using, and Qwest sure isn't making any of this capacity available to anyone else. Whenever I inquire about high-speed DSL service here, I get told that Qwest can't afford to upgrade various rural exchanges, and that it was just supposed to lay and operate the cable, not make connections to it.
Never mind that CenturyTel, a midget in comparison to
Qwest's 14-state empire, can afford to upgrade the Saguache
and Westcliffe exchanges for DSL. Never mind that Qwest
can afford to pay $30,000 a week to Joe Nacchio, its former
CEO, for consulting.
Maybe he's worth that money, since Qwest has figured out a way to collect money from us while providing next to nothing in return for the MNT.
Our state government doesn't seem interested in fixing this problem of the cable that few can use. I've talked to half a dozen rural public officials about this, and they all say that even if they were interested in connecting to the MNT, they can't find out how.
MNT and Project Beanpole sounded like good ideas at the time. They might still be made to work, since the cable is pretty much in place. But the state government needs to make it work, and it hasn't.
This is, however, an election year. The next time Gov. Bill Owens is in town asking for your vote, you might ask him why we're not connected even after spending all that money with Qwest.
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