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Updated · Mountain Mail Newspaper · Apr 28Visionary Broadband internet services resume after vehicle collision disrupts fiber box
3 articles · Updated · Mountain Mail Newspaper · Apr 28
- A 33-year-old woman from Poncha Springs crashed into a Lumen Technologies fiber box near U.S. 50 on April 26, causing the outage.
- The incident affected internet and mobile services in Salida and Poncha Springs, with repairs completed by April 28 and service restored that morning.
- Police struggled to identify the box owner, delaying repairs, while a separate five-hour power outage also impacted Xcel Energy customers in the area.
How much economic damage did this rural Colorado internet outage cause local businesses? A single car crash cut off four towns. Is our digital infrastructure too fragile? Could AI-driven monitoring have prevented this two-day internet and mobile service blackout? Could open-access networks stop one company's failure from causing a regional communication blackout? With outages increasing, are utilities investing enough in network reliability?