Watching the rollout of Fort Collins’ Connexion broadband network, Glen Akins can’t help but think about Disneyland.

Disney theme parks have two famous strategies for making long lines more bearable: Entertain the customers while they’re waiting and show them the line is progressing.

“So far, Connexion’s not doing either,” Akins said in a January interview. He campaigned for the 2017 ballot initiative that allowed Fort Collins to build a municipal broadband network.

Akins remains an advocate for community-owned broadband, and he’s confident Connexion will be successful. But he’s among a group of residents and city leaders who’ve grown frustrated with the lack of transparency about the network’s progress since service launched in August 2019.

"I'm very disappointed by the shroud of secrecy that has outlived most of its purpose by this point," said Colin Garfield, who led the citizen campaign for the ballot initiative. "There has been a clear demarcation drawn between the original brand launch in 2018 and now, in terms of transparency and engagement."

Over the six months since the first customer signed up, Connexion leaders haven’t shared which neighborhoods have gained access to service, where construction has been completed or when specific areas of the city can expect service. They’ve also declined to share the number of customers signed up, although a Coloradoan open records request found that contractors had finished at least 300 home internet installations as of early March.

Connexion's buildout is expected to take until 2022 or 2023. Residential pricing for gig-speed internet is set at $60 per month plus $10 monthly for WiFi, and customers can bundle internet with landline phone service. TV service and business pricing haven't rolled out yet.

Connexion leaders pledge to share more details in the future, and they’ve committed to posting quarterly reports with project updates. The first one was expected in late March before the coronavirus outbreak, but the virus has thrown many city plans off schedule, so its release has been delayed.

Connexion Executive Director Colman Keane and marketing manager Erin Shanley are asking the community for patience and understanding as the network gets off the ground. They said they understand the frustration, but they’re reluctant to share any information that could aid competitors Comcast and CenturyLink and hurt Connexion’s viability — which, in a worst-case scenario, would hurt the Fort Collins Utilities ratepayers who are on the hook for millions of dollars if the network fails.

“We’re trying to do what is best for the community overall,” Keane said. “The success of this project is critical. There’s a fine balance to the information we can provide and the competitive risk.”

Still, the dearth of information seems unfitting for an enterprise founded on community trust and funded by $142 million in city-issued bonds, Fort Collins City Council member Ross Cunniff said. To set itself apart from private internet providers and prove its trustworthiness, Connexion needs to hold itself to a higher standard for openness and accountability, he said.

“It is owned by the citizens of Fort Collins,” Cunniff said. “To the extent that we can show it won’t harm the taxpayers’ interests, we should err on the side of transparency. You can’t effectively operate a government through fear — fear of the unknown or fear of competition.”

Why Connexion isn't sharing some information

The advent of municipal broadband is an existential threat to private providers like Comcast and Century Link, who’ve historically faced little or no competition for internet, TV and landline phone service. That was clear in 2017, when the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association spent $816,000 fighting the Fort Collins ballot measure that let city government enter the broadband market. Priorities First Fort Collins, funded by the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce-affiliated group Citizens for a Sustainable Economy, spent another $85,000 trying to stop Connexion before it started.

The Fort Collins Citizen Broadband Committee spent a fraction of that — $15,000 — advocating for the ballot measure. It passed with 57% approval.

That level of support illustrates a crucial advantage Connexion has in Fort Collins: A significant portion of the community is eager to ditch their current internet provider. A residential survey in 2016 found that 43% of respondents would switch from their current provider to municipal broadband even if the monthly price and speed were the same.

But Connexion also faces a major liability: The city has to grapple with aggressive competition while funding and building a brand-new utility from the ground up. To pay for it, Fort Collins City Council authorized $142 million in bonds to be repaid between 2018 and 2042. (For comparison’s sake, the city’s entire 2020 budget is about $652 million.)

Fort Collins officials plan to pay back the bonds, plus nearly $100 million in interest, with subscriber revenue. The city has interest payments due twice a year and has to repay a chunk of the bonds in December every year between 2022 and 2042. It can use some of the bond money to make those payments, but that’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it leaves the city with less money to build out the network.

So it’s important that Connexion expands its subscriber base quickly enough to pay off the bonds and interest. Connexion ultimately needs a 28% take rate to succeed, Keane estimates, which equates to thousands of households signing up. If the network fails to take off, there will be no subscriber revenue to pay the bills. The city would have to repay the money it had already spent by adding a surcharge to Fort Collins Utilities customers’ monthly bills.

Why no news feels like bad news

Keane and Shanley said they’ve seen no indication that Connexion is anywhere near worst-case-scenario territory. But when they say the early stages of the rollout are critical, they’re right. That, they explain, is why they’re keeping details about the rollout close to the vest.

One of the most common questions they get is when service will be available in specific neighborhoods, but Connexion leaders say they’ve learned from other communities that publicizing a construction schedule creates community pushback if the prospective timeline isn’t realized. When you’re working underground and dealing with weather, other utility lines, irrigation ditches and land easements, it’s easy to run into an issue that delays construction by 6 months or more, Keane said.

And Keane is concerned about how private providers, who are reportedly already papering parts of the city with special offers, would react to a construction timeline.

“You’re broadcasting to your competitors what you’re doing and where,” he said. “They could literally be right in front of you. The packages they would offer when they know a very targeted area would be better than when they shotgun across the city as they do now.”

More:As broadband comes to cities in Larimer County, rural service faces challenges

Construction of a broadband network is pretty conspicuous, Cunniff and others point out. Don’t Connexion’s competitors already know where they are?

Keane counters that the assumption is “not necessarily correct” because a lot of work goes on behind the scenes before a neighborhood is activated, and the order of construction doesn’t always correspond with the order in which neighborhoods get service. Crews sometimes pull fiber in a neighborhood even though the network’s path to that area doesn’t exist yet.

One person does have a good idea of where service is already active: Akins, who has created a map of construction and service availability using a network of contacts and tipsters, social media, City Council’s public emails and observations from biking around town.

From his research and his background working in cable TV, he estimates Connexion is about six months behind schedule. If that’s the case, he thinks city officials should tell people.

“I think it’s important for people to know this isn’t a 100% smooth process,” Akins said. “There are some issues that pop up, but that’s true with any major engineering venture. It’s not anything the city should be hiding — and hiding it makes it seem worse than it probably is.”

Cunniff agreed. He said in February that he also suspected the rollout is behind schedule, mostly because of big snowstorms and frigid temperatures that relentlessly walloped Fort Collins between November and February. He said he observed start-up issues during construction in his neighborhood, when contractors appeared to run into issues co-locating infrastructure with the electric utility system.

Cunniff said Connexion should be giving regular updates on construction, including a map of where it’s completed and statistics on how many neighborhoods crews have worked in and how much fiber they’ve pulled.

“The city could do a much better job of integrating that information for citizens so people don’t have to drive around and make a crowd-sourced map of everywhere Connexion’s been to try to guess what’s going on,” Cunniff said. “Because frankly, if I were an uninformed citizen and I saw this, then I would have to assume that the city’s not doing well. What other conclusion would you draw? I don’t think it’s an accurate conclusion, but I understand why some citizens are asserting such things.”

Cunniff introduced the idea of a quarterly report similar to what publicly owned companies provide to their shareholders. He said he asked staff about it for a few months before he got a commitment in February.

He said he doesn’t think Connexion should publish revenue or customer numbers yet. The latter, he said, isn’t a good metric of progress because the public doesn’t know how many neighborhoods have been activated.

Garfield said the prospect of the quarterly report was "welcome news" and an opportunity for Connexion to show accountability and transparency.

In his view, the reports should include information about:

Total premises passed without providing deployment maps

Cost savings found with existing conduit within the city's footprint and/or additional cost savings found otherwise

Percentage of total premises passed out of total premises in the service area

Health of bond spending

Marketing updates and efforts

Upcoming events and partnerships

How the public can get more involved

Process improvements sought and accomplished (specifically installation hiccups with extra permit pull, payment portal vulnerabilities, and account security)

Customer service metrics

Evidence of install rates increasing and duration of install appointments decreasing

A completely revamped FAQ with more meaningful questions, including some submitted by actual residents and customers

Information about staffing, considering many employees have "come and gone since the launch"

Rollout meets current expectations, Connexion says

Public invoices obtained by the Coloradoan show that Connexion’s number of home installs has increased from less than 10 per week in the fall to an average of 27 per week between mid-January and early March. To get closer to revenue projections laid out in the city’s broadband business plan and make the 6% payment-in-lieu-of-taxes planned for the city’s general fund, Connexion would have to increase its rate of installations from about 30 a week to more like 30 per day.

Shanley declined to comment on the invoices, but she said the rollout is “meeting our current expectations.” She and Keane added that Connexion’s business plan was “pro forma,” which is back-of-the-napkin approach that uses hypothetical circumstances and assumptions. A pro forma business plan, for example, couldn’t predict that Fort Collins would have a historically snowy fall and winter — or that a global pandemic would occur.

Previously:Fort Collins Connexion plans big discounts on gig-speed internet for low-income residents

Connexion will also start taking in more revenue when TV service is available. The process is dragging out because Connexion had to sign more than 200 contracts with providers and is now waiting for those providers to authorize the contracts. In February, Keane said about 70% of the channels were locked down, but they want to make sure Connexion has “all the key ones” before launching video.

It’s not yet clear how much information will be included in the quarterly reports or exactly how Connexion will strike the balance between private provider and public utility.

Connexion’s own business plan emphasizes the need for “a governance structure different from the current Utility Enterprise governance” that provides “the ability to have private discussion with City Council on matters of strategy, pricing, implementation (and) service plan changes.”

Council has entered private executive session multiple times to discuss Connexion since it launched last fall. Council members, Cunniff included, have encouraged state legislators to pass a law that would allow them to use executive session to discuss anything related to “competition in providing telecommunications facilities and services.” That could include negotiations, strategic planning, pricing, sales and marketing, and development-phasing — a wide-ranging category that could include nearly all Connexion-related discussion, depending on how it’s interpreted.

Keane said some information about Connexion will probably always remain under wraps. But he said the community can expect a clear picture of Connexion’s progress once the network is mostly built out and it becomes harder for competitors to target specific neighborhoods.

“For some period of time, you want to keep (construction information) under cover as long as you can,” he said. “After a certain point, it’s less of an issue. … Our intent will be over time as we get closer to whatever that magic mark is, we can provide more transparency.”

Jacy Marmaduke covers government accountability for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter @jacymarmaduke. Support stories like this one by purchasing a digital subscription to the Coloradoan.​​​​​​​

What can you do with gig-speed internet?

A gigabit is equal to 1,000 megabits. For context, here's the minimum speed required for easily carrying out common internet activities. Keep in mind that multiple uses add up, so if you need 5 megabits-per-second to stream on Netflix, and two people are streaming at your home, you need a speed of 10 mbps.