ElektraFi is deploying a dual fixed wireless and fiber broadband network across Grand County, Colorado, in an effort to close connectivity gaps in a market where mountain terrain has long made wireline builds expensive.

The project, profiled in Lightwave's Building Broadband series, illustrates a deployment model that rural operators across the US are increasingly adopting: use fixed wireless access (FWA) to reach dispersed homes quickly and cheaply, while extending fiber toward population centers and anchor institutions where density justifies the capital spend.

Grand County sits in north-central Colorado, west of the Continental Divide. Like many Rocky Mountain jurisdictions, it combines small town clusters with widely scattered properties, a geography that pushes the cost per subscriber of a pure fiber build-up. A hybrid access strategy lets ElektraFi serve both segments without waiting years for a full fiber-to-the-home rollout.

Why combine fixed wireless and fiber?

The logic is commercial rather than technical. Fiber delivers the highest capacity and longest upgrade path, but trenching in mountain terrain carries high civil works costs. Fixed wireless equipment, by contrast, can be installed on towers, ridgelines or existing structures and can start generating subscription revenue within weeks.

The trade-off is capacity and consistency. FFA links share spectrum and degrade under weather and line-of-sight constraints, so operators typically reserve them for lower-density areas while steering high-usage customers onto fiber as it becomes available.

For ElektraFi, the hybrid approach also hedges demand risk. The operator can validate take rates in each coverage zone with wireless service before committing fiber routes to the neighborhoods where demand justifies the investment.

Context: federal funding raises the stakes

The deployment plays out against a shifting US broadband policy backdrop. Federal programs, including the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) allocation process, have pushed states to prioritize projects that deliver higher-speed, lower-latency connections — criteria that favor fiber but do not exclude hybrid designs where fiber is not yet economically viable.

Rural operators able to demonstrate both a working network and a credible fiber upgrade path are generally better positioned for subsidy support than those betting on a single access technology.

What comes next?

For Grand County residents, the immediate effect is a growing choice of providers in areas previously limited to satellite or legacy copper service. As ElektraFi extends its fiber footprint outward from the wireless-served zones, the county's connectivity picture should continue to improve over successive construction phases.