Brainstorm Internet is bringing gigabit-per-second Internet speeds to two downtown Durango buildings.
Residents and businesses at the Crossroads Building, 1099 Main Ave., and the Bank of Colorado building, 1199 Main Ave., will have fiber Internet wired directly into the buildings.
“This is an exciting time for Durango to finally get the fastest fiber Internet speeds available,” Jawaid Bazyar, president of Brainstorm Internet, said in a prepared statement last week.
Brainstorm was sold Oct. 3 to Forethought.net of Denver.
Bazyar said the company will expand fiber-optic broadband to other locations.
“We are in talks with real estate developers to light up entire apartment, condominium and office buildings to provide our service,” he said. “Our goal is to address the digital divide one building at a time. We will continue to deliver the fastest services possible throughout Colorado and New Mexico.”
A gigabit is 1,024 megabits. Many local office buildings have Internet access of about one-tenth that speed.
FastTrack Communications of Durango also offers high-speed Internet downtown. The company has a 10-gigabit ring downtown, and each building plugged into it has a minimum of 1-gigabit service, general manager Kelly Hebbard said.
“Obviously, we have a lot of capacity downtown,” she said.
Gigabit Internet has been a popular topic since 2011, when Google announced it would bring gigabit Internet speeds to the Kansas City area.
James Torres, information technology operations manager for La Plata County, cautioned that actual Internet speeds also depend on the capabilities of the switch or router used.
But, he added, gigabit Internet would provide a more seamless Internet experience for most users.
“To give a building a gigabit connection, it essentially gives their residents the option to take their car out onto the Autobahn,” he said.
Torres added, “The data transfer is going to be faster, you’re video streaming is going to be cleaner and your audio connections are going to be much better.”
La Plata County offices now have 50 megabits per second of outgoing bandwidth, or about one-twentieth the speed Brainstorm plans to install a few blocks away. Torres said that’s fast enough for the county’s current needs, but the county may need faster speeds before long as more employees use mobile devices on the job.
The city of Durango has a bandwidth capacity of 130 megabits, but typically uses half that, said Eric Pierson, the city’s information services manager.
Pierson said the increasing availability of gigabit Internet speeds is “great news.”
“That’s a very large pipe, and certainly as more and more cloud services are available, whether it’s for applications that a business uses, or for email or for backup, that requires more and more bandwidth.”
cslothower@durangoherald.com
