Comcast Leases Fiber From Transportation Agency

Comcast and the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) have announced a first-of-its-kind fiber optic network lease agreement that will benefit Colorado residents as well as Comcast’s subscribers in mountain communities. The agreement lets Comcast lease two of CDOT’s existing single-mode fiber optic strands along the I-70 Corridor for 20 years, with rights to extend the agreement after the initial lease period.

The agreement will benefit Colorado residents by increasing capacity along 1-70 between Golden and Vail, and allowing Comcast to launch advanced features and services. This is the first time CDOT has leased a portion of its network.

The leased fiber runs from approximately Golden to Vail and is part of CDOT’s existing network, which the agency uses for high-speed communications to the CDOT business network. This includes electronic sign message control, traffic camera surveillance for quicker incident response and verification, travel time detection, weather station monitoring and communications over digital trunk radio, all of which is fed to CDOT’s Intelligent Transportation Systems website for use by the public, media and other CDOT partners who provide road and weather information to the public. Comcast is leasing “dark fiber,” or cable that CDOT was able to make available.

As part of the lease agreement, Comcast will provide support for this portion of CDOT’s fiber network with maintenance services, including weekly inspection of the network’s “backbone,” replacement of damaged or missing fiber markers and clearing and cleaning debris from network pull boxes and other access points. The maintenance services provided by Comcast will free up much needed resources for CDOT.