CenturyLink says faster broadband now available in Red Feather Village

CenturyLink on May 3 promised faster broadband speeds would come to Red Feather Lakes Village by early to mid-summer. On May 25, company officials reported a technological fix is complete and said Village residents should now be able to access the Internet at speeds of between 5 and 6 Mbps.

“We installed the DS 3 relief there last week, so the slow speeds should be corrected,” CenturyLink’s Northern Colorado area operations manager Alan Davis told North Forty News. “Now we are regrooming our equipment to provide greater stability. We’re ahead of schedule and are continuing to work on it.”

Davis and members of the engineering team spoke at the May 3 meeting of the Red Feather Lakes Planning Advisory Committee and about a dozen members of the public that was called in response to complaints about both Internet and telephone service.

Several people living beyond the Village told the PAC that they rarely achieve the 1.5 Mbps service promised by the company. The unreliability of the service keeps them — and others — from effectively telecommuting, which seriously affects the local economy, they said.

Davis said projects to provide more consistent service in surrounding areas such as Crystal Lakes will be moved up on the company’s priority list. He said the company’s engineers worked to increase bandwidth in the area late last year, but growing demand for video streaming and other services has maxed it out again.

“We need a long-term plan that will allow us to expand our pipeline to stay ahead of consumer demand,” he said.

He said such upgrades are expensive, and that as a public company, CenturyLink has to make decisions on how to invest its capital effectively.

While Davis distributed his business card to the group so they could discuss their issues directly with him, he also said that it was important for customers to report any service problems to CenturyLink’s customer service department to create a “trouble ticket.” That creates a history that can be tracked, he said.

PAC member Lucille Schmitt said when phone calls don’t go through, business owners usually don’t know something’s wrong unless the caller contacts them on a cell phone. Several audience members said with greater availability and reliability of cell service, they are dropping their landline service altogether.