Leaders in Morgan County are striving to develop a state of the art broadband system and infrastructure that will provide Morgan County users with options for quality voice, high-speed Internet, video conferencing, and data transmission capabilities that are reliable, affordable, and scalable to allow for future upgraded services and capabilities.

The Morgan County Telecommunications Revenue Assessment, a business case developed in August 2002, was developed to:

• Attract existing telecommunications companies to expand services in the county.
• Form a public/private partnership to offer high-speed bandwidth.
• Build a fiber backbone in high-density parts of the county while contracting with service providers for other solutions elsewhere in the county.

Since that time, the City of Fort Morgan has completed the installation of a fiber optic ring that links the city, county, and schools. If a business is interested in connecting to the ring, the business would be responsible for the cost of installation of the fiber and electronics to the nearest location and would be assessed a percentage of the monthly fee, based on the number of users on the ring.

The good news is that high-speed data service providers are now serving Morgan County and there will be competition regardless of what the County chooses to do itself pertaining to a telecom infrastructure.

• DSL is available in Fort Morgan. With Qwest DSL, customers can surf the Internet at speeds ranging from 256 Kilobits per second to 7 Megabits per second, which - at the highest DSL speed - is approximately 125 times faster than a transitional 56 Kb dial-up connection.
• Since two local ISP's began offering wireless Internet in 2000, the demand for bandwidth has dramatically increased with one firm reporting 300% growth per year.
• Bresnan Communications, formerly AT%T Broadband, the cable television company in Brush and Fort Morgan, is piloting digital cable service for high speed Internet in homes.

• fiber optic ring to link city, county, and schools


• high-speed data service providers


• wireless connectivity