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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report connected to City Fiber. There are already two or three minor fiber outages every year due to the reliance on only the route to Seattle. This is a problem shared by many other US communities where the incumbent ISPs have not made the investment and don't want to cover the cost for a second fiber path to the Internet. One solution to consider to the problem is for Ellensburg to join with other communities in the region to create a redundant path to the Internet. This articles' discusses a recently completed effort by a number of communities in northwest Colorado that had the same problem. These communities pursued grants and other funding that allowed them to create a diverse route to the Internet for the region. B. Broadband Coverage and Mapping We talked to each of the local broadband providers that sell business and residential broadband in the city today. Our hope was to get more detail, and hopefully mapping of existing fiber from each ISP. This is something that CCG Consulting and Finley Engineering undertake routinely in communities all over the country. In the majority of communities we've worked with, we get little or no feedback from the incumbent telephone company and cable company. However, in Ellensburg we were able to have lengthy conversations with local representatives from both incumbent providers. Unfortunately, both companies were unwilling to share fiber maps—something they feel is proprietary. But we learned a lot about how the companies operate in the community. Following is a summary of what we found about each provider along with maps we were able to prepare. City Fiber The city was forthcoming about its fiber business and fiber network. The city originally build fiber, starting in 1999 to serve city building and other government locations. This was done originally as a cost-savings measure, but also to bring better broadband to the city and schools than what was available at the time. The city has built a 30-mile fiber network that reaches into many parts of the city.As part of the project, we were able to create a map of the city network, but they asked that we not publish it due to security concerns. This is not an unusual request and fiber owners of all sorts are worried that detailed maps could make it easy for vandalism or other damage being inflicted to fiber networks. In 2017 the city launched a commercial ISP with the marketing name of City Fiber18. The business was launched as a trial in areas of downtown that are identified in the map below in green. City Fiber will connect fiber to any business within that area. The city considers the trial a success and is open to the idea of expanding the ISP network to other businesses that are located near to existing fiber—but the city has not yet offered service outside of the trial area identified on the map. 17 https:llnwccog.org/programs/broadband/project-thor/ 18 https://ci.ellensburg.wa.us/564/Telecommunications Page 61