New capacity in North Golden!

A new and high-speed "mini-pop" came on line for good last week and has it's first members on it! This is going to replace the Mountain Ridge mini-pop since it has a better view of north Golden, Mountain Ridge and parts of downtown Golden.

This mini-pop is on a members roof and is not attached to our equipment on Lookout Mountain. That provides us some additional redundancy should there be a catastrophic failure at the Lookout Mountain tower facility...

We are going to be moving a handful of existing members in north Golden off the Lookout tower and onto this new site (called "Cliff Line") to increase speeds and reduce load from Lookout.  In our initial testing, we are able to achieve download speeds in excess of 125 Mbps and upload speeds in excess of 40 Mbps from members houses that are attached to the new site. This is a big improvement from the 50 Mbps maximum we have from the Lookout Mountain site.

Cliff Line mini-pop

Mountain Ridge and N. Golden repeater coming online

New repeater in Mountain Ridge

Due to popular demand in the Mountain Ridge subdivision and area surrounding, we are adding a new repeater site. This is located just west of Mitchell Elementary and will service parts of the south half of Mountain Ridge, GoldCo Cir and area in between.  We are working on a roof rights agreement to add an additional site in the Mesa Meadows subdivision to hopefully complete our coverage on the north side of town.

Buffalo Bill Days gets free Internet from AU Wireless

Temporary radio on the roof of the AMC

AU Wireless provided free Internet to the Golden High School football teams fundraising tent at Buffalo Bill Days in Golden this past weekend.  We were contacted by a future member of the co-op who asked if it would be possible to help out the football team and provide Internet to allow the tent to have a couple point of sale computers for people to buy merchandise online and support the team.

Since our main Internet connection is in the American Mountaineering Center right across the street, we asked the AMC for permission and they happily allowed it!  Please thank the AMC and Colorado Mountaineering Center when you next visit for helping support AU Wireless and local fundraising in Golden!

Radio on the GHS Football team tent

Easley Rd site is up!

Member antenna looking towards the tower on the house in the distance

After weeks of preparation, four volunteers helping with the install of the repeater site and a week of testing the site with an existing member, we finally added our first "new" member to the Easley Rd antenna site. We are officially calling this antenna "Easley-East" since there are already plans in the works for Easley-West. However, at this point, Easley-East should have no problems servicing the residents that have asked for service from us. Five additional new members are scheduled for installation prior to the July 4 holiday.

This is AU Wireless' second mini-pop (or neighborhood tower). The first was added in Harmony Village. We have plans in the works to add a third mini-pop in the Mountain Ridge neighborhood later this summer. Stay tuned for details on that.

Welcome Harmony Village!

Transmitter in Harmony Village

Today we brought our brand new "mini tower" on-line in Harmony Village. Due to increasing demand (and a bunch of big cottonwood trees), we decided Harmony Village needed its own transmitter. With the help of Micah, one of our members, this transmitter is ready to go and has its first member on it! 

This new mini tower will accomplish two things:

1) It will get the residents of Harmony Village on-line much faster
2) It will prove a concept AU Wireless is looking to deploy in other neighborhoods 

Bringing the transmitter local (vs the top of Lookout Mountain) reduces congestion on the three transmitters on Lookout and speeds up the connections to the individual member homes. It also potentially allows more homes to see the local transmitter. We have plans for this type of deployment in the Easley Rd area, in the Mountain Ridge subdivision and downtown Golden.

Harmony Village is a perfect location for our first mini tower and we welcome the residents to the network!

First multi-tenant building is online

1203 Washington Ave roof

This week we turned on our first multi-tenant building at 1203 Washington Ave. This is a six unit condo complex that is primarily rented out to Mines students. Our first customer is on-line but we put in equipment to easily connect the other tenants of the building.  In addition, this roof provides a nice vantage point for WiFi radios, should the city ever want to provide WiFi in the business district...