New Westside Distribution Point (CLA) Nearly Done

Some of you have volunteered and helped with the new westside distribution point project. We want to thank you all and tell you that project is essentially done—your volunteer efforts have paid off!

For the rest of you, what is the new westside distribution point ? Called CLA for short due to its Camino Los Abuelos location, CLA is a new radio cluster location near the corner of Camino Los Abuelos and NM-14, and when fully complete it will be serving all LCWA internet to the LCWA westside coverage areas (Madrid, Cerrillos, NM-14 Corridor, and the Camino Los Abuelos Corridor). Basically, it receives one of our bulk internet feed and sends it off to in all directions to cover the seven westside neighborhoods. This replaces, expands, and improves the operations of the old westside distribution point, just down the road, which was reaching a number of growth limits.

Why is CLA important?

There are a ton of good outcomes to this new CLA distribution point, but the main one is it allows higher speeds and increases reliability to the entire network. In fact, it is the early stages of CLA that allowed us to nearly double our speeds to all members last spring—by introducing a new bulk internet feed to LCWA.

CLA allows greater speed and reliability in a few ways. Mainly, we now have a totally new internet bulk feed (purchased from Lumen) that originates at CLA, thus doubling LCWA’s sources of bulk internet. That opens up more bulk internet to both east and west coverage areas.

Next, we are installing upgraded radios at this new distribution point, ones that increase speed to the westside neighborhoods.

And finally, since it’s fed by a separate bulk supplier, if our other bulk suppliers go down, we now have a major fallback source to draw on as needed. It is automatically shared with the east side if their bulk supply goes down for example

Remaining Work

The last work needed to finalize CLA is to install the new receiving radios in some key westside neighborhoods. Those radios upgrade internet speed and reliability in those neighborhoods.

To this end, in the next week or so we’ll install new receiving radios at the north Goldmine Road access point and at the CerroChato tower. These serve most of Cerrillos Village and most of the rural, 4WD areas west of Madrid and HorseShelter. The HorseShelter access point serves most of the south part of General Goodwin Rd. and Old Cash Ranch Rd.

All these neighborhoods will then be outfitted with our new, higher-capacity radios that are full duplex, and FCC licensed.

Great thanks goes to all the volunteers and staff members who made this new distribution location possible and who are working on the final build out. Also great thanks goes to the member who owns the land where LCWA is building the distribution point—without their generous contribution, this project would not be possible.