Colorado Central Telecom – Secom Westside Network Area Acquisition – Upgrades Plan
Hello,
The team at CCT wanted to take a moment to update you on our upgrade plans in your area.
Among other issues that were discovered upon our takeover of the Secom area network, we discovered many technical issues with the Towers (many of which have only solar power generation with battery power to the equipment), where the Site has too much equipment and power consumption than the batteries could handle.
The Network was designed in a way that when one side went down only a portion of the customers were re-routed (the others suffered an outage) and even upon re-routing the connections came to a crawl, as there was not enough backhaul bandwidth in the network to take on the overflow. CCT has been redesigning, upgrading and replacing equipment in this network starting as early as mid-January and we expect to have most of the larger and recurring problems resolved by the end of the third quarter, but upgrades will continue well into 2022.
Here is a summary of our progress to date:
We started the year with 13 access points that no longer met the new FCC guidelines, and we started upgrading them to become compliant at the beginning of the year –
- So far, we have upgraded 6 of the 13.
- Service calls have been taking place continuously to get customers on the new access points, and many of the ones who have been switched are experiencing much better service.
The remaining 7 access points will be more difficult since they are at remote battery/solar powered sites that do not have enough power available for us to put up the new equipment and keep the old equipment running until all the service calls have taken place.
We believe taking the extra time to upgrade and future proof the power at these sites makes more sense than doing it now without the required power, taking service away from nearly 300 customers until a service call could be scheduled for them.
This summer we will upgrade the power at Clay, Deer, and Democratic Mtn Towers (with the remaining 7 access points.) Once their power is upgraded, we will install the new equipment, and then schedule service calls for the necessary customers on those access points. In addition to upgrading per requirements, we will be adding many additional access points to improve service at the same time.
We are also in the process of installing a new communications site in Westcliffe. This will be the spearhead for bringing fiber to Westcliffe proper, and improve the backbone and backhaul for several of our terrestrial fixed wireless towers.
As for our power upgrades the sites that require power upgrades are Arlie, Rosita, Josh, Demo, Deer, Clay, Centennial, and the Custer County Courthouse Communications site. The status of where we are with these upgrades is below:
- We have already updated equipment at Arlie Tower and upgraded the power at Rosita Tower, and we are in the process of getting South Colony on AC, and Tom on CCT dedicated AC. We are also in the beginning stages of getting AC power to Josh Tower. Power will be upgraded at Centennial in June.
In addition, as part of our efforts to update and stabilize all our Subscriber’s Internet service in Custer, Fremont, and Huerfano counties, we have identified that many of our Subscribers do not have a Wi-Fi router in place to connect into our Service Provider Network.
In order to provide the most stable, secure and consistent Internet Service, we are requiring all Subscribers have a Wi-Fi router to connect to our network for Internet access no later than June 15th 2021. Without a Wi-Fi router a Subscriber’s connection is open to security issues and does not allow our technical support team to identify the cause of many service disruptions.
We just want to assure all of our customers all that we are working as quickly as we can to improve the network in your area. We appreciate your business and will provide ongoing updates to you over the next several months.
The CCT Team