I Left Xfinity for Conexon Connect’s Two-Gig Fiber. Here’s How the Switch Went.

After a decade as an Xfinity customer in Colorado — and six months of watching its service go dark while I try to work from home — I switched my house to Conexon Connect, the fiber service powered by Mountain View Electric Association’s $190 million co-op network, which has finally reached the Tri-Lakes. A strand of glass no thicker than a hair now runs to my house carrying symmetrical two-gig internet — a wired test clocked 2.07 gigabits down, 1.84 up, at 19 milliseconds of latency — and after living with it I can say the speed is real, the process was smooth, and the support was genuinely good. I also have one real complaint, a shallow drop line that shouldn’t have been left the way it was, plus some hard-won advice about routers, where the equipment ends up, and getting a public IP. Here is what the switch actually looked like, and what I’d want a neighbor to know before they sign up.

Why I switched

I didn’t go looking for a new internet provider so much as get chased into it. I’d been an Xfinity customer for more than ten years in Colorado, and for most of that stretch it did the job. The trouble started about six months ago, when the service began going dark — outages that weren’t the occasional blip but frequent and long, the kind that kill a workday and a video call in the same afternoon. I work from home, and a connection I can’t count on isn’t a nuisance, it’s a liability. Each time I called, the customer service made the outage feel like my problem to solve. When I learned that Conexon Connect’s fiber had reached my address, switching wasn’t a hard decision.

The network behind the wire

The service is branded “Connect, powered by Mountain View Electric Association,” and the wording is precise. MVEA — the member-owned electric co-op that has served this part of the Front Range since 1941 — owns the infrastructure and the relationship with the member. Conexon Connect, the internet arm of a Kansas City fiber firm, designs and builds the network and runs it day to day. The two announced the partnership in June 2021 as the largest broadband project in Colorado, with kickoff events in Black Forest and Limon, a supportive statement from Governor Jared Polis, and unanimous approval from the co-op’s board.

The promise was to bring fiber-to-the-home to 100 percent of MVEA’s members — today roughly 58,500 of them across portions of eight counties — without raising electric rates to pay for it. The network runs along the same distribution infrastructure that already carries power: roughly 5,800 miles of fiber, about $190 million, funded through a mix of Conexon financing and, later, federal and state grants. There’s a certain symmetry to MVEA being the one to do it. The co-op was organized in 1941 by members who met at the Black Forest Community Center to build electric line into country the big utilities wouldn’t serve. Eighty-four years later, the same co-op is pulling glass along those same routes for the same reason.

The build didn’t arrive on schedule — MVEA has been candid about delays in the first year and a half — but it has since picked up speed. By 2025 the project was past its halfway mark, with crews laying more than 20 miles a week and the finish target for initial construction pulled forward to the end of 2027. More than 30,000 members across 40-plus open zones now have access, and MVEA names Monument explicitly among the active areas. For a Monument household, availability is now a question of address, not of whether. The only reliable way to know is to enter your address at connectsignup.com; the answer changes street by street.

In Monument, It’s All Underground

In Monument, all the utilities run underground, so the whole network is buried. Conexon uses horizontal directional drilling to pull the backbone underground, then a walk-behind trencher — the Ditch Witch type of machine — to run the individual drop from the street to each house. It’s less disruptive than it sounds; there’s no digging a canyon across the yard, just a narrow slit for the cable.

Which brings me to my one real complaint. The crew ran my drop with the trencher, but the line to my house ended up under an inch deep — sitting just beneath a little landscaping rock and the weed barrier, in a stretch that gets driven over and freezes solid in winter. Fiber drop cable is not armored garden hose; it’s comparatively fragile, and a sub-inch burial in a drive-over, freeze-thaw path is asking for a break.

There’s no single national rule that dictates how deep a customer fiber drop must be, and a shallow run can be acceptable when the cable is protected inside conduit. Mine isn’t. It’s bare drop cable, no conduit, sitting under an inch of rock — so the one exception that would excuse the shallow depth doesn’t apply here. And the industry benchmarks all call for burying it far deeper than mine got. Large providers commonly spec a residential drop at a minimum of about 12 inches; direct-burial best practice runs closer to 18 to 24 inches; and in cold climates the guidance is to get the line below the seasonal frost depth so heaving ground doesn’t work it loose or snap it. Unprotected cable an inch down meets none of those. I’ve submitted a support ticket to have it reburied properly, and to Conexon’s credit, the technical support representative was friendly and took it seriously. But it’s the thing I’d tell every neighbor to watch for: when the drop crew leaves, go look at how deep your line actually is — and whether it’s in conduit — before you sign off.

The Equipment: You Don’t Have to Take Their Router

Once the line reaches the house, two pieces of equipment do the work. The underground drop first terminates in an exterior enclosure on the side of the house — mine is a gray CommScope box screwed to the siding — where the buried line hands off to the wiring that runs indoors.

Inside, an Optical Network Terminal, or ONT, converts the light signal on the fiber into a standard wired ethernet connection. From there, most people take Conexon’s Wi-Fi router — a Calix gateway that comes with the Managed Wi-Fi subscription and runs the household’s wireless.

But you don’t have to. If you’d rather run your own equipment, you can skip the router entirely and take just the ONT, connecting your own gear to it directly. You can also leave Conexon’s Calix unit in place but switch it to a bridge, or pass-through, mode so your own router does the actual routing. I run a UniFi Dream Machine Pro Max, so this mattered to me: I wanted my network, not theirs, in charge.

Here’s the practical wrinkle nobody warns you about: where the ONT ends up. It gets installed where the fiber enters the house, which is often a garage or an exterior wall — mine is in the garage. If your networking gear lives in an interior mechanical room, or a basement in the middle of the house with no outside wall, getting the connection from the ONT to that room can be a genuine problem. I got lucky: I already had ethernet run from the garage entry point down to the mechanical room in my basement, so bridging the two was trivial. If you don’t have that in-wall wiring, plan for it, because you may otherwise be stuck with the ONT on an outside wall far from everything else.

The public-IP catch, for the remote-access crowd

One more thing worth knowing if you host anything at home or want to reach your own network from the road. By default, Conexon puts customers behind what’s called carrier-grade NAT, or CGNAT — essentially a shared public address split among many households. It works fine for ordinary browsing, but it means you can’t simply forward a port or VPN back into your home router from outside; there’s no unique address on the public internet pointing at your house.

There are two ways around it. The first is to run an overlay VPN like Tailscale or WireGuard, which stitches your devices together over an encrypted mesh and works right through CGNAT without any public address — Tailscale will even run on a UniFi router. The second, which is what I did, is to call and request a public, routable IP address. Conexon’s support handled it without fuss, and with a real public IP my remote access and port forwarding behave normally. Either path works; if you don’t know what any of this means, you almost certainly don’t need it, and the default setup will serve you fine.

What It Costs

Connect sells three residential speeds over the MVEA network: Essential at 200 megabits per second, Premier at one gigabit, and Ultimate at two gigabits — all of it symmetrical, with no data caps and no contract. The standard rates are $79.95 a month for the gigabit tier and $99.95 for two gigs, but few new customers pay those numbers up front. My own two-gig Ultimate plan came in at an introductory $59.95 a month for the first six months, stepping up to $74.95 after that — still a quarter below the $99.95 sticker price, and no contract to sign. The co-op advertises the whole promotion as a three-year price lock “starting at $44.95 a month” for the entry tier, an offer set to close at the end of September 2026.

The catch is that the exact promotional price for any given speed only appears once you enter your address in the sign-up flow, so confirm your own number there rather than trust any single advertised figure. A few other line-items worth knowing: the internet bill arrives separately from your MVEA electric bill and the two are never combined; billing extras are modest but real (a $1 paper-bill fee if you don’t go paperless, a $10 late fee, plus location-based taxes); and the router is part of the optional Managed Wi-Fi add-on, so if you bring your own equipment you can leave it off.

It’s the Fastest at My House — but Not the Fastest in Monument

Conexon Connect’s two gigs are the fastest speeds I can actually buy at my address, and that qualifier matters, because Monument’s internet map is a patchwork that changes block to block. Two other names are worth knowing if you’re shopping.

Force Broadband is the local option, headquartered right here in Monument, and it earns consistently strong reviews from neighbors. Where its fiber reaches — King’s Deer, Forest Lakes, Canterbury Estates and a handful of other pockets, roughly a fifth of Monument homes — it advertises symmetrical speeds well beyond what I have, up to the multi-gig range, and it fills in the gaps with fixed-wireless service for addresses outside the fiber footprint. If Force’s fiber is on your street, it’s a serious contender; it simply isn’t built out to mine yet.

Quantum Fiber is the speed ceiling on paper. Now owned by AT&T — which closed its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen’s home-fiber business, including the Quantum Fiber and CenturyLink brands, in February 2026 — it advertises plans up to 8 Gig in select Monument areas, four times my Conexon service, at around $165 a month for the top tier, alongside cheaper multi-gig options. “Select areas” is the operative phrase; its footprint here is limited and expanding, so whether you can get it, like everything else in this town, comes down to your exact address.

The lesson from three providers with three different maps: don’t assume what your neighbor has is what you can get. The single best way to see every option at your specific address is the FCC’s National Broadband Map, a federal tool that lists the providers, technologies and advertised speeds reported at any location — a useful starting point before you call anyone, though you should still confirm directly with the provider, since these maps can run ahead of or behind what’s actually installed on your street.

The Verdict

The speed is as advertised — better, actually. A wired speed test clocked 2.07 gigabits down and 1.84 up, essentially the full two symmetrical gigs I’m paying for, at a latency of 19 milliseconds. Those are numbers Xfinity never came close to holding at my house, on the rare afternoons it stayed up at all. The install was smooth, the pricing is fair for what you get, and every interaction I had with support was friendly and useful, including the two fussy ones — the public-IP request and the burial complaint. I’m frustrated about the shallow line, and I think it’s a real quality-control gap worth flagging publicly. But it’s a ticketed fix on an otherwise genuinely good service, and after six months of the alternative, having symmetrical two-gig fiber running into the house still feels a little like science fiction.

The plans (residential; rates move with promotions — confirm at sign-up):

*Three-year price lock, new residential members, offer ends 9/30/26; standard rates after 36 months. Symmetrical speeds, no data caps, no contract. Internet is billed separately from your MVEA electric service. Managed Wi-Fi (the router) is an optional add-on; you may use your own router or run ONT-only. No public “refer-a-friend” credit is advertised as of this writing — confirm current promotions at sign-up.

Sources & further reading

• Conexon Connect — Monument service and plans and the MVEA network overview
• Conexon Connect — home internet tiers and installation FAQ
• MVEA — Partners with Conexon Connect to Close the Digital Divide (June 2021) and the Fiber Broadband Expansion Update (March 2024)
• FCC National Broadband Map — address-level provider and speed lookup
• Force Broadband (Monument) and Quantum Fiber (Monument); AT&T’s acquisition of Lumen’s home-fiber business closed Feb. 2, 2026
• Fiber burial-depth references reflect industry practice and provider specifications (large-provider residential drop guidance near 12 inches; direct-burial and cold-climate best practice of 18–24 inches or below frost), not a claim about any specific building code

Methodology

This account is based on my own installation in Monument in 2026, plus Conexon Connect and Mountain View Electric Association’s published materials, public reporting, and industry references.

Pricing and promotional figures were current as of research in July 2026 and change frequently. Speed, availability, and rate for any specific address should be confirmed at sign-up.