Denver Municipal Fiber Network - Repeal SB 152 (Longmont: sales, 2015)

[jmedelman]

Hi All,

As a work from home, selpf employed, IT consultant, I am interested in Denver building out its own municpal fiber network. This may require either a referendum or city ordnance to not follow SB 152 - The Colorado law that restricts cities from creating their own municipal fiber network.

So far, 7 Colorado communities have already passed their own referendums. Longmont is even on it's way to build out it's own fiber network to be completed in 2017.

The Denver Post wrote an article last year about the hurdles involved and the potential benefits (including economic, jobs, competitiveness, etc.).

Is anyone interested in helping me look into this and perhaps getting a referndum on the next ballot for Denver?

Here are the Denver Election Rules. I am not a lawyer and would need help understanding the legalize.

Thanks!

Jacob Edelman

[smihaila]

Interesting - yes, I've heard about Longmont having some balls.
Bravo to you for wanting to push for initiatives like these. Me too I am an IT professional, and I am appalled by the Comcast and CenturyLink oligopoly and crazy (and ever increasing) prices for just a plain internet service, without TV, phone and other crap.

[JWEvergreen]

We trimmed our monthly Comcast bill down by $100 per month 2 years ago by dropping cable TV from our bundle (we still have internet and phone). A cheap antenna will get you some of the local channels for weather, news, etc. The money we saved bought us new computers! Netflix is cheap. Watching movies on the big screen TV is easy. And if you burn all your DVD's onto the computer, you have your whole library at your finger tips.

I'd love to see a new company step in and change things up a bit!

[smihaila]

I've even dropped Netflix, because it kind of sucks (movies are old, but it's not those old-but-great, artsy kind of movies i.e. Criterion Collection etc but crap).

Re: Phone - get rid of it! If you aren't mobile / sales person / road warrior, it is a money waste. And in that case, go with voip technology - saves enormously ($1 fixed cost per month to keep you phone number available, plus any pay-as-you go costs which are about one cent the minute everywhere in North-America, and 1.5-2 cents/minutes in almost all other countries including Europe, if you are not calling cell numbers).