The Early Years
Communication Construction & Engineering (CC&E) is a Colorado underground utility construction contractor, founded in 2001 as a two-person cabling shop by Russ Moore and Bret Wagner. Russ brought an aircraft mechanic’s precision and a structured cabling background. Bret brought years of outside-plant experience with carriers like Qwest and CenturyLink. Their promise was simple: take care of the customer’s communication needs, inside and out. Early jobs ranged from CAT5 network cabling to re-cabling the 9NEWS studio to CAT6.
The company grew outdoors from there, trenching fiber optic cable for the Adams County IT Department. When that work pushed the economics toward horizontal directional drilling (HDD) instead of trenching, CC&E bought its first drill rig and brought HDD in-house instead of subcontracting it out. That decision still defines the company today.
Growing Across Colorado
Over the next decade, CC&E took on bigger municipal fiber and utility construction projects across the Denver metro and Front Range, including a turnkey underground fiber build for the city of Thornton that opened the door to years of similar work. The company built out its fiber splicing capability, grew its fleet of drilling and trenching equipment, and upgraded to Vermeer drilling equipment after a job at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in 2016. In 2020, right through COVID, CC&E built its headquarters in Adams County, where crews still stage every morning before heading out across the region.
CC&E Today
Today, CC&E is a full-service underground utility contractor based in Colorado, with the ability to extend into surrounding states for the right project. We specialize in fiber optic construction, low voltage infrastructure, and electrical infrastructure, backed by horizontal directional drilling, trenching and excavation, and Colorado 811 utility locating. We also handle duct bank and conduit placement, vault and handhole installation, fiber fusion splicing and testing, and the engineering, permitting, and documentation that carries a project from design through closeout. Our crews and project managers work across every environment, including urban rights-of-way, private campuses, utility corridors, and public infrastructure.
In 2025, CC&E joined a Colorado-based group alongside Trace Fiber Services and IKON Traffic, with the same operational leadership team that built CC&E still in place. Our teams understand the technical demands, regulatory requirements, and precision timing that fiber, low voltage, and electrical infrastructure projects require. When you partner with CC&E, you can expect transparent, proactive communication, accurate upfront pricing with minimal change orders, on-time execution and job site professionalism, a commitment to safety and permitting compliance, and a job finished to the last detail, with no loose ends. Twenty-five years later, the job hasn’t changed: build the underground utility infrastructure Colorado depends on, no shortcuts, no surprises.