WideOpen delivers super-fast Gig fiber to Blacksburg and Montgomery County homes

Blacksburg, Virginia, 8/4/21
WideOpen Blacksburg announces it is now adding Fiber to the Home (FTTH) customers to their network at a record pace in Blacksburg and the New River Valley, and is starting to deliver Gigabit service to businesses including the Blacksburg New School.

The company’s Blacksburg-area backbone was completed in early June. Since then, fiber construction has moved into several Blacksburg neighborhoods, and hundreds more Blacksburg homes are scheduled to receive fiber connections this summer. The company provides the fastest Internet in the region, and the expanded network can deliver Gigabit, 2Gig,10Gig, and 100Gig fiber services to connected businesses and residents.

Andrew Cohill, WideOpen’s CEO, described the company’s current activities. “Our next generation fiber back-bone passes by nearly every business and residential area of Blacksburg. We have a complete network expansion roadmap for 2021 and 2022, and we will be connecting homes to our fiber network steadily as we complete new lateral network segments.”
The company is also expanding its network in Montgomery County, and some residents in the Catawba Valley got connected in December and January. Most of those homes were on extremely slow DSL, and they are delighted with the speed of WideOpen’s rural fiber service.

Lynn Huber, who coordinates the company’s Blacksburg project, said she has been getting thank you notes from new customers. “They are telling us their children can finally do their school work and participate in virtual classroom activities at the same time as their parents work productively from home.”

WideOpen has been getting service requests from all over Blacksburg and Montgomery County. Potential customers are telling the company they want what WideOpen offers: excellent service, a choice of services and ISPs, connections that don’t drop, and lightning fast uploads and downloads. The WideOpen fiber network has been designed specifically to support homes and businesses that need high performance two way video support for services like Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Webex. Scott Hebdon, a new customer in the Catawba Valley area has been very pleased with the service: “I truly appreciate that the WideOpen team brought Gigabit fiber to us; it has made a tremendous difference to our children and their ability to do their schoolwork.”

Huber described an important feature of the network. “Our network is fully symmetrical, meaning upload and download speeds are the same. When a customer fine tunes their new setup, they are shocked at the difference between their previous old-fashioned, copper-based network with slow upload speeds and WideOpen’s lightning fast wide open Gigabit fiber. Batches of photos, large files, and work documents move back and forth to the cloud without affecting any other internet activities.”

WideOpen Blacksburg is a subsidiary of WideOpen Networks, and both companies are based in Blacksburg. WideOpen Networks provides the network back office technical support for the Blacksburg network, but the company also maintains and supports nine other networks in Virginia, Montana, and New Hampshire. The company has a national reputation for network design, construction, and management, and has designed and built modern fiber and wireless networks throughout the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean.

In January 2021, Parks Associates released a study indicating 41% of US households took part in a Telehealth visit in 2020; Half of all kids under 18 have a high degree of interest in continuing with Telehealth visits; and 29% of households expect to purchase a connected health product in the next 12 months.

The industry leapt through 5 to 10 years of development in just a few months. Telehealth demand, combined with an increased use of smart fitness devices and a need for healthcare in a world subject to massive quarantine, contributed to rapid progress and increased Telehealth offerings by medical practices all over the country. There are more developments to come: Apple watches, Fitbits and other fitness wearables are potentially capable of detecting wearers are getting sick more than a week before the first symptom appears, according to a study conducted by Stanford Medicine's Healthcare Innovation Lab. Other studies are being conducted to see if these devices will be useful in detecting COVID-19 infections.

Medicaid is getting in on the Telehealth movement and recently worked with Centene Corporation to create a partnership with the National Association of Community Health Centers. $5 million will be spent on equipment and providing "training and technical assistance to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) to ramp-up their capacity to provide telehealth solutions."

It has never been more important to bring a minimum of 100 mbps symmetric Internet services to more people. WideOpen Blacksburg installs new Gigabit networks that lower the real costs of telephone, TV, and Internet services for businesses, local government, Telehealth providers and residents. We include 12 pairs of fiber in every conduit for use by governments in any way they choose, including potentially providing service to those on limited income.

PC Mag has released their "Best USB Wi-Fi Adapters for 2021" survey. This is one of my favorite annual roundups of new technology!

As we carve out odd spaces for home offices, we're ending up in weird corners of kitchens, attics, or basements where Wi-Fi may not reach....

Read more: Best USB Wi-Fi Adapters for 2021

Find out how to reach those odd nooks and crannies without dropping a bunch of cash on a mesh system. Not that we don't like mesh systems: We love mesh systems, but sometimes they are overkill!

We're working hard to bring high speed internet out to underserved rural clusters at the same time as we build out our in-town infrastructure. Construction has begun in this beautiful and remote area of Montgomery County. Seventeen more country homes will be lit with WideOpen fiber by Jan 1.

Can you tell where they are working?

You're welcome to keep your current TV service, but most WideOpen customers rarely keep a cable or satellite television provider for more than a couple months after having fiber Internet installed. Streaming top quality HDTV over fiber is as easy as a click of the remote. We offer a detailed TV guide (updated every few weeks) to help you make the best possible choice when selecting streaming providers*. The guide explains many of the available TV plans (from just a few local channels to full live TV packages) offered by the top tier providers including AT&T TV, Hulu Live TV, YouTube Live, Fubo, Sling, Pluto, and Philo live streaming TV providers. Have fun exploring a new world of entertainment including AMC+, Disney+, Netflix, AppleTV, Britbox, Amazon and HBO Max.

How do I watch streaming TV?

Blacksburg - Choices for internet in town are rapidly changing.

WideOpen Blacksburg, the product of a company based at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, plans to deploy approximately 40 miles of fiber over the next year that will be capable of servicing up to roughly 8,000 homes in neighborhoods off...

Read more at the Roanoke Times

The evolution of electronic communications has repeatedly been marked by disruptive technologies. In the mid-eighties most electronic communications were made between monochrome terminals and mainframe computers. Crude modems were used to dial up and establish remote links to the mainframes.

In the early nineties forward thinking companies like Apple were getting on the Internet and ditching their mainframe communication systems. Around the same time in 1993, Blacksburg, Virginia, began a revolutionary experiment to connect everyone in town to the Internet. Their first efforts were with modem-to-modem communications and they quickly expanded to Ethernet connectivity. In 1993 someone could live in Blacksburg and have a way to connect to the Internet with Ethernet. It was revolutionary. People moved to Blacksburg specifically for the world class connectivity.

The first widely available modems were 300 baud (300 bits/second) devices. Faster smart modems which could automatically connect to a terminal session led to the rise of bulletin board systems (BBSs) that allowed users to dial in and communicate with each other. The first disruptive step was the creation of modem-accessible chat rooms, pioneered by AOL. While modems got faster and faster, most people outside of Blacksburg and university campuses were still dialing into a pool of modems to get to the Internet. In 1996, the average person with Internet access (there were only 20 million of them) spent less than 30 minutes a month surfing the web. Sometimes a web page took 30 seconds to load. Dialing on the phone for an internet connection required use of a phone line and patiently redialing to get past the busy signal.

It was something of a revolution when DSL and cable modems were introduced into the area. With their arrival, everyone else not connected with the university was able to be "always connected" to the Internet. It was the beginning of the end of "internet sessions" and "terminal sessions". This was truly the second disruptive step in the ladder to a more accessible Internet (World Wide Web). Many of the dial-up Internet companies shelved their rooms full of modems, and moved onto other services. True open access to the internet essentially ended at that time.

Today most people have DSL or cable modems which are hybrid systems using a combination of fiber for the backhaul and copper for the “last mile” to bring the electrical signals that they use to carry information to your home and business. While DSL is no longer considered fast enough for modern Internet connectivity, over time cable modem speeds have gotten better.

Seven years ago a good Internet cable modem connection had speeds of 33 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload. Today a good cable modem can have bursts of 500 Mbps download speeds. Unfortunately upload speeds have not improved as much over cable and rarely push up out of the 25 Mbps threshold . The download to upload ratios over copper wire today are a dismal twenty to one (20:1) at best.



Nothing comes close to the symmetric speeds the customer gets with fiber, and only fiber holds the promise of open access to the internet. Blacksburg residents will finally have access to Fiber Internet as WideOpen builds out the network throughout the town. We're aiming for the gold standard for Internet connectivity of fiber all the way to the user. That is true today and will be true well into the future.

Fiber is the best alternative for working from home, gaming interactively, streaming video and music, uploading media, speaking with contacts across the globe, monitoring security systems, or running a business from a residential neighborhood. A fiber optic backbone will cover and exceed a family’s needs for Internet, TV and phone — and typically raises home values in connected neighborhoods. There has never been a better time to FutureProof the home.

A super fast, reliable Gigabit fiber network with resiliency and redundancy is what businesses and home users want and need. The WideOpen Concept keeps telecom, media and internet dollars in the community, which means more local jobs and a boom to the local economy. Because each community owns their fiber optic network, homeowners and businesses have true choice of multiple providers offering multiple services.

The WideOpen Concept translates to business class service anywhere the network is implemented.

Thanks to everyone in the Deer Run and Indian Run neighborhoods who have already filled out a survey! We still need more responses, and if possible would like to hear from as many as possible, even if you say "No" to fiber right now.

People are asking, "What is the next step?"

Once we are reasonably certain we have heard from most of you in a neighborhood (or as many as seems reasonable), we will organize a neighborhood meeting so we can tell you more about our plans and how we would go about building the fiber out in your neighborhood. We will hold the neighborhood meetings in our offices in Blacksburg on a weekday in the early evening--we know folks are busy, and want to make it as easy as possible for you to get the information you need to make a decision.

Thanks again for the enthusiastic response, and be sure to tell your friends and neighbors.

Best regards,
Andrew Cohill
Manager and Founder, Blacksburg Broadband LLC