Wireless Internet Access

Grand County Internet has been providing high speed wireless connections since 2001. At that time, there was no other form of high speed internet access in the county. Since then, we have installed more than 450 wireless radios at customers thru out Grand County. We have built a wireless backbone extending from Grand Lake to Winter Park. We have reinvested our money in building this network and expanding it. The only section left is to expand the backbone to is Hot Sulphur Springs and Kremmling. We still use T1's in those towns. Early in 2005, Comcast turned on it's digital cable and brought high speed cable to some parts of the county. Recently Qwest has finally started to add high speed DSL and they will expand those offerings. It does not matter. This has just increased the awareness of the importance of high speed internet. We have not been able to keep up with the demand, as we go to areas that are not and probably will not be reached by cable or DSL.

Also, wireless internet has some advantages. We are able to easily grow our network and expand it to new areas. The network we built also allows us to offer the DSL internet access thru Qwest and it goes right into our Super high speed network.

Wireless has had the disadvantage in that the customer equipment is high cost and in Grand County this is worse as most of the equipment that is low cost will not survive the extreme temperature and weather it is subjected to.

Wireless should be considered under the following conditions:

• If Cable and DSL do not reach you, Wireless probably can.
• For Businesses, it is less expensive than cable and we can provide multiple IP addresses if you need to run servers or have a large number of computers that need access. It can replace T1's at a much lower cost and offer higher speeds.
• It is more secure. You are not on a network with all your neighbors. They can not peer into your network.
• We have had customers tell us their wireless here is faster than their cable and DSL connections in other areas. This is usually because cable and DSL, as they get built out, have more customers on the same network.

On these pages we are trying to give you an idea about how wireless works, where it's available, what it looks like, what's involved with an install, and of course, what it costs and the paperwork to get it installed.