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Regional Issues on Connections
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The "Beanpole" Project
The "Beanpole" project has received $10 million to give grants to local governments to date. These grants are aimed at attracting private companies to provide high-speed Internet access to rural areas in Colorado in order to bridge the "Digital Divide."
The grants are made in two phases to multiple local government groups. The goal is to aggregate local demand and reduce costs. The first part is the planning grant and the second part is the implementation grant.
The planning grants are used to assemble and catalog the communities’ high-speed Internet telecommunication needs. The planning grant recognizes that many rural communities do not have the expertise or funds available to do this work.
The bulk of the funds are given as implementation grants. Governments are given money to attract private companies to build high-speed Internet access in their communities. The private company is thus guaranteed a revenue stream on which to build its business.
The Beanpole project has funded 20 basic and advanced planning grants (29 counties involved) and six implementation grants (16 counties involved) to date.
Below is a summary of the Beanpole project.
Telecommunications is critical to economic survival for all of Colorado; however, rural areas lag in telecommunication services deployment. Party lines,aged switches, redundancy, lack of features, and limited capacity are all examples of this lag.
State agency telecommunications traffic is being pooled in the Multi-Use Network. This will provide a market incentive to private providers to set up 76 high-speed connection points, called State Aggregated Network Access Points (ANAP), mostly in county seats.
Communities, with support from State Beanpole grants, will pool their buying power to provide market incentives to private providers to set up local ANAPs for connection to the State ANAPs.
The public sector acts as "anchor tenant," which can provide a market solution to improving telecommunications in under-served areas of the State.
The result is a network of private provider high-speed access connection points (ANAPs) throughout the State available to businesses, homes, nonprofit agencies, and public facilities.
The Beanpole project will therefore help disperse population growth and economic opportunity more evenly throughout Colorado through improved telecommunications.
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