Major LCWA Infrastructure Upgrades Under Way

As our LCWA member base grows, and as the internet consumption by each member increases, we are quickly finding the need to upgrade our network capacity.

That’s why we are adding a huge new radio to our main internet connection path.

Above is a picture of the radio being installed a few weeks ago by a volunteer.

And above is a picture of volunteers and staff lifting the radio into place, adding it to our current radio cluster on the roof of the NCGR building in Santa Fe.

Why do this now?

This new radio is a very high-capacity 11 Ghz model that will greatly increase our ability to deliver internet. It’s also quite expensive, running us about $18,000 in equipment costs.

And we definitely need this now. We are already seeing dips in speed in some places in our network during high-consumption video streaming periods in the evening. Everybody seems to be dropping older video presentation methods and moving to internet streaming of high-resolution movies. As a result, we (and some of our members) are feeling the pinch.

More to Come

This is just the first stage of our upgrades. After this, many of the main back-haul radios throughout our network will be upgraded to increase capacity.

Who Is Doing This?

Thanks go to Phil Curnutt, our main network staff member, for designing and implementing the radio upgrade. Thanks also go to Reiney Brown for designing and implementing the fiber optic links to our main internet routers. Thanks to the board for approving the expenditure, and thanks go to the many volunteers who showed up to help install the radio on the roof.

This new radio link should go online in the next month or so as we complete installing the matching radio at our main distribution point on Vail mountain.