Kruse, a consultant for NEO Connect, put her message to members of the Greeley City Council this way on Tuesday: "Internet is everything."
The council, which started an initiative in 2016 to look into ways to invest in broadband, heard the outcome of a feasibility study completed by NEO Connect, a Glenwood Springs-based broadband consulting firm hired jointly by Greeley and Windsor, during a work session. Greeley paid $50,000 for the study and Windsor paid $35,000.
The report included recommendations from the firm and members of city staff that ranged from implementing broadband-friendly policies and ordinances to working with community stakeholders to connect with a fiber network.
"It impacts every parcel of our lives, from education, health care, economic development," Kruse said. "It's how our kids all communicate, it's how businesses communicate and put their product information out there. It is impacting every area of our lives."
For the city, there's work to be done.
Mayor John Gates said he'd like to turn to the community to gauge next steps.
"We'd like to have our citizens weigh in because we have some options," he said. "But no matter which way we go, it's not going to be easy."
Still, Kruse's presentation provided a glimpse into where Greeley currently stands in terms of broadband.
On a broad level, Kruse said the Federal Communications Commission defines appropriate broadband as a minimum of 25 megabits per second in download speeds and 3 megabits per second in upload speeds. For Kruse, those speeds aren't particularly high.
"It's a really low bar that the FCC has set," she said. "And what we're seeing is that cities are looking at the gigabit strategy."
Gigabit broadband, Kruse said, is the gold standard of service. It means residents are using 1,000 megabits per second in both upload and download speeds.
Kruse's recommendation is for the city to get closer to that standard.
But, she said, it's difficult to pin down what service providers in Greeley already offer. While Colorado's Office of Information Technology maps out the level of service used across the state, she said, "there's issues with the way this report is put together."
For one, she said, the maps are put together by the current service providers based on advertised speeds.
"Sometimes, the advertised speeds and actual speeds are actually different," she said.
The other issue is that providers report services based on a census block. That means that if one neighbor receives gigabit service and the other doesn't, the map will still reflect a block that does offer the service.
She said the firm asked Comcast and CenturyLink to help fill in the gaps on the map.
"Comcast has stated that they have gigabit services available throughout Greeley, and the data that we're seeing from the state, and data that was gathered from the speed test do not show that they have gigabit services throughout the community," she said.
But the city is still waiting on the information, stalled by a non-disclosure agreement.
In terms of the current infrastructure, Greeley already has a few fiber assets. The town's traffic lights are connected with fiber, put in place through a grant from North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Additionally, the city has worked to install an extensive fiber network. It currently owns about 17.6 miles of 2-inch broadband conduit
Comcast and CenturyLink also have fiber optic networks in Greeley, according to the report, but maps of them are not publicly available.
©2018 the Greeley Tribune (Greeley, Colo.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
