Blacksburg, Virginia, 11/17/2022

If you’re an adult enjoying the last couple of months in 2022, you likely have faced your fair share of technology decisions. Maybe you remember the decision to get your first cell phone or even better, the decision to upgrade your flip phone to a smartphone? Then there is the life-changing decision to completely give up your landline telephone. Haven’t done that yet? There is still time.

The point is that technology changes and there comes a time when we all move to the next technology. Some of us move faster than others. One of the technologies that I championed for years even before coming to WideOpen is fiber. Some of you have our fiber near your homes in Blacksburg but have yet to take advantage of it even as WideOpen Blacksburg continues signing up customers.

I have been in the technology industry for over four decades whether you believe me or other industry experts, fiber is the future for Internet connectivity for homes.

The reason that I can say this so confidently is that even the old line cable and DSL companies are deploying fiber to the home (FTTH). Verizon long ago stopped doing copper-based DSL as did AT&T. Both are now focusing on only fiber. Recently, we started running into Xfinity/Comcast FTTH. Here is what Xfinity says about fiber.

We’re excited to bring a new all-Internet Protocol (IP) technology, fiber-only network known as EPON (or Ethernet Passive Optical Network) to some communities in your area! If your community has arranged for Comcast to build this new network, you’ll have a faster internet connection, with fast download and dramatically faster upload speeds, access to more advanced TV service and a more reliable network.

So the question is why are they NOT offering you fiber in your Blacksburg neighborhood. The truth is that fiber is expensive to build and if they are already getting revenue from you, they are unlikely to invest a great deal more money to get the same amount of money or less from you.

The other truth is that cable companies are very happy to have you caught between a hard place and a rock with no other company offering better, less expensive Internet connectivity. When cable companies are pressed by communities, they prefer to cloud the decision process by talking about speed upgrades to your current copper cable network. Those rarely come to fruition unless there are competing providers threatening to swoop in and take revenue from the incumbent cable provider.

Industry experts such as the CEO of Bell, Canada’s largest provider of Internet connectivity, have thrown some cold water on the idea that the next generation of coax cable technology, DOCSIS 4.0, is going to solve the upload speed problem for coax cable providers.

The CEO of Canadian operator Bell became the latest to cast doubt on DOCSIS technology’s ability to compete over the long term. His comments came in response to a question about whether Comcast’s recent multi-gigabit DOCSIS demo has Bell concerned that cable players in the country might be able to put up more of a fight against fiber than originally expected.

Bell’s CEO Mirko Bibic argued the trial was conducted in a lab environment – not in real world field conditions. From Bell’s perspective, it still doesn’t see a true path to multi-gig symmetrical speeds using DOCSIS.

“The true symmetrical DOCSIS path is quite unclear, and it’s going to take a while. And even then, I don’t think they’re going to come close to our upload speeds, and it’s going to be an expensive proposition either way,” he said. Bibic said that means operators have to choose: swallow the cost and deploy fiber or make an expensive investment in DOCSIS that has an uncertain payoff.*

To put the final nail in the coax coffin, on November 15, as part of our consulting business we talked to a cable company in another part of the country looking for help. They need help because they have recently been awarded a grant to build 141 miles of fiber and they have also decided to upgrade all of their copper coax connections to fiber.

Actually, the coax-cable coffin has room for one more nail. After realizing that there were no pieces of coax cable in my equipment closet that I could haul out for a picture, I went looking. I went to Walgreen’s which had a wall full of HDMI, Ethernet, and USB C cables but no coax cable, I tried and also struck out at our local Food Lion. I was headed to Lowe’s Home Improvement when I decided to try Dollar General. They had one coax cable but it was behind the counter. It is probably a good rule that if you only find your cables at Dollar General, maybe it is time to start thinking about upgrading how you connect.

All of this means that fiber is future and you should check to see if our fiber is near your home, and if it is, you have another technology decision to make. Are you ready to move up to the Internet’s gold standard of home connectivity- fiber to your house?

If you still need some convincing that you should be thinking about switching to fiber, try this link about staying technologically ahead of your grown kids, Keeping Updated Just Enough to Stifle Giggles.

Or if you really want a dose of how much fun cable technology updates can be, try this post about the last time I upgraded our cable box in 2018. It was the my last cable upgrade since I am lucky enough to be on a fiber network run by North Carolina telephone company that long ago saw the light so to speak and began the process of upgrading their copper network to fiber.

- David Sobotta, Vice President, WideOpen Networks

*Bell isn’t convinced DOCSIS can deliver symmetrical speeds
By Diana Goovaerts, Nov 9, 2022 Fierce Telecom

Blacksburg, Virginia, 08/15/2022

Things have changed a lot since the original iMac® introduced “simple” Internet connections. Steve Jobs also introduced USB to us in with the iMac 1998. It was a technology developed at Intel and popularized by Apple. USB replaced a myriad of other connections because it was better, faster, more reliable and easier to use.

Today the number of USB devices on my desk surprises even me and I feel like I was there for USB’s birth. USB provides connections for all sorts of devices to Macs, Windows and Linux computers. They all work.

Most of us in 1998 ending up using the modem to get to the Internet and not the Ethernet port. Connecting to the Internet was often not as easy or simple as the marketing brochures promised. Fortunately, technology changes and those changes have made it much easier to connect and stay connected to today’s Internet.

WideOpen Blacksburg offers symmetric fiber Internet connectivity to its customers. Almost everyone living in Blacksburg today has a home Internet connection but not everyone has fiber. Fiber is better, faster, more secure, and easier on users. It is also competitively priced. Fiber, just like USB, will replace less technologically advanced Internet connections over the next ten years or so. If you do not have or understand fiber, maybe you are wondering why our symmetric fiber is such a big deal?

For lots of good reasons, fiber is often called the gold standard for home Internet connections. Technology adoption moves in stages. Most people are familiar with the technology adoption curve. We all know about the innovators and early adopters but just where do fiber to the home users fit in that curve?

We will get that answer but first let’s get some basic understanding of how to evaluate home Internet connections by looking at concepts that are familiar to everyone. When the first Interstate highways were built in the fifties they were a huge technological advance over two lane highways.

The one thing that was quickly discovered about Interstate highways is that the communities that had immediate access prospered. Also businesses and people who quickly figured out how to take advantage of them did exceptionally well. Interstate highways had the capacity to move huge amounts of traffic much more easily than two-lane roads which were often clogged with slow traffic.

Fiber is an even more capable technological advance than Interstate highways. While you have to build more lanes to increase the capacity of Interstate highways, with fiber you increase capacity by changing the electronics at the ends. It would be like putting a bigger entrance and a larger exit on a stretch of highway and magically more lanes appearing in the road between them. Fiber is technologically advanced because it moves information with light.

Fiber is also proven technology. Fiber has been the Internet backbone for decades. TAT-8, a transatlantic fiber optic cable, was built in 1988 and linked the United Kingdom, France and the US. Fiber is also a well-tested commercial technology which has become a cost effective way to deliver Internet connectivity to homes. WideOpen was involved in the design and construction of nDanville, the Danville, Virginia fiber network. Their fiber network by all measures contributed to their economic revitalization. Amazingly, Danville’s fiber network has been in operation since 2008. Since FTTH (fiber to the home) was being offered in 2008 in Danville, we are well past the early adopter phase. In the fall of 2011, Danville became the home of a Cray Super Computer. Their fiber infrastructure played a role in bringing it to town. Since FTTH (fiber to the home) was being offered in 2008, we are well past the early adopter phase.

Fiber is superior technology because it moves information faster. The best way to understand the advantage fiber is to look at the fiber speeds that are already available. Chattanooga, Tennessee’s fiber provider, ECB, deployed 10 Gbps residential connections in 2015. In August 2022, they announced the availability of symmetric 25 Gbps for residences and business. It is unlikely that there are many people who need that much bandwidth today, but it does mean the fiber that we build to your house today will be more than capable of meeting your full connectivity needs now and far in the future.

Looking at the big picture of Internet connectivity from an individual homeowner’s perspective is easy if you have recently gotten a fiber connection like I did. When we moved to Mocksville, North Carolina, eighteen months ago, we evaluated a number of things from the perspective of how will it meet our needs five or even ten years from now? Our Internet connectivity was one of our prime concerns and having been on the Internet since 1993, my understanding of the technology gave me the tools that I needed to make a decision.

I am in my eleventh year working for WideOpen and like my previous years in technology at Apple, it has been as a remote worker with a home office and an Internet connection. It did not take a lot of math to figure out that the coax-cable technology we had been using for years was not improving fast enough to meet my business and personal needs. Beyond work, I take thousands of photographs a year and store some big files from my books in the cloud. I am not unusual in today’s world.

In fact even if you are an average US household, you likely use more data than you think. The data we use is growing rapidly and that growth has shown no real signs of slowing as our economy is reshaped by new pandemic-driven work habits.

“Consumer broadband consumption in North America reached a milestone in the fourth quarter of 2021 as averages hit 536.3 gigabytes (GB) – surpassing half a terabyte (TB) – according to a new study from OpenVault.”

“That figure represents an increase of 165% when compared to the average of 203GB per month OpenVault found in its Q4 2017 study.”

As you read the balance of this article keep in mind that your bandwidth needs are going to grow a lot over the next few years. Your broadband connection should be able to handle that growth.

Almost nine years ago in 2013, when I wrote an article, “ Just How Bad Is Your Internet Connection ,” our cable connection delivered 32.24 Mbps down and 5.49 Mbps up. When we moved in Feb. 2021, we were getting 484 down and 24 Mbps up. While it looks fast (and the download speed is except my network ping reading was at 27 milliseconds- ping is a good measure of the responsiveness or delay in your connection), what it really shows is that our download speed was fifteen times what it had been nine years earlier but our upload speed had NOT even gotten to five times what it was. My needs as a video conference user/content provider were not being met.

It is obvious to heavier users of the “Cloud,” that coax speeds have focused on downloads and not successfully pushed ahead with faster upload speeds that we need. In their defense, the technology to increase upload speeds with coax cable is difficult and sometimes requires a lot of tuning. As is often the case with a technology like coax that is pushing its limits, users’ needs are growing faster in different directions (uploads) than coax cable technology can easily deliver today. The recording industry tried a number of things before iTunes® and similar services driven by new more scalable technology won the day.

As many people learned during the pandemic, upload speeds matter and if you are sharing a connection with people in your own household and your household is also on shared bandwidth with your neighborhood instead of using fiber which provides more individual bandwidth, you can get frustrated. Work does not get completed on time, video conferences don’t go as planned and files, including homework ones might not get where they need to hit those all important deadlines.

The questions we asked ourselves when deciding to jump from one technology to another one were pretty simple. Is the new technology proven technology? Is it better technology? Is it reasonably priced? Will it provide my family with a better experience and will it have the capability to grow with our needs over the years?

I answered all of those questions in the affirmative so I went with fiber. The only thing cable had going for it was a low priced introductory offer but I remember well how the rates rapidly went up at the end of the second year when I signed up the last time.

While I am living in rural Davie County, North Carolina, across the road from a twenty acre soybean field, I have Gig fiber with speed regularly exceeding 900 Mbps up and down. My ping has dropped from 27 ms to 1 or 2 ms so I have a much more responsive connection. I could have chosen any of at least three other technologies. On July 31, our power flickered out for a couple of minutes during a thunderstorm. As the Internet and our WiFi came back up a minute or so later, I was reminded of all the similar times that I had spent staring at cable modem lights for what seemed like ages as I waited for all the signals to sync so the Internet could return.

If you decide to not to go with fiber, remember cable companies are still working to commercialize the technology that will allow them to theoretically compete with the fastest upload speeds that we are offering today to our customers in Blacksburg. Are you willing to wait the years that it will take them to get DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications) 4.0 finalized, out of the labs, debugged and deployed in the field? You will also be gambling on the cost that they will eventually charge you.

Fiber is a proven technology, now available at a competitive price. To quote the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Meanwhile, fiber systems have at least a 10,000 (yes ten…thousand) fold advantage over cable systems in terms of raw bandwidth.” What that means for an individual homeowner is that there is plenty of proven technology already in place to make your fiber connection even better next year and five or ten years down the road.

I mentioned fiber is the “gold standard”of Internet connectivity. With ever more photos and videos being produced in your home along with all the other always-on digital services that are rapidly becoming essential to our lives, why wouldn’t you go for the gold and snatch a great fiber connection with symmetrical upload speeds?

I cannot think of a single reason. There are video solutions out there for streaming that mimic the cable experience. There is someone in our house, my wife, who was convinced that streaming would be impossible to learn. That turned out not to be the case. She now owns our Amazon Fire remote. Remember the first self-serve gas pumps and ATMs? When they came out, we were all surprised that we mastered them without very much angst.

Wherever you are in the broadband world and whatever technology you have, take a close look at local companies providing fiber . It is likely they will be committed to providing great service because they are your neighbors.

iMac® and iTunes® are registered trademarks of Apple Inc.

1. Light Reading- Average data consumption eclipses half a terabyte per month

- David Sobotta, Vice President, WideOpen Networks

Blacksburg, Virginia, 06/10/2022

The Internet and I got to be friends almost 30 years ago and as I wrote in the article, Connecting Electronically Wasn’t Always So Easy, my Internet speeds and connectivity have struggled to keep up with my business needs.

In the fall of 2013, I was getting 22.51 Mbps down and 5.26 Mbps up. By 2020, the best cable service I could get managed 481 Mbps down and 22.8 Mbps up.

That might look fast but those highly asymmetric cable speeds just did not allow for easy, consistent video conferencing or the quick transfer of very large files to and from the cloud. Those two things define my business life.

Fortunately a move to a not so remote area and buying a new home in a subdivision with fiber (which I like to call a Fiberhood) changed everything. Having symmetrical fiber made a huge difference in what I can do from my home desk.

We got  our symmetrical 500 Mbps service the day after we moved in the house. We never even bothered to sign up for cable at our new house  but we have gotten very good at streaming very good at streaming so television has not been a problem. An inexpensive VOIP service gave us another phone line besides our smartphones.

However, technology marches on and as I got more bandwidth, I wondered if I would notice even faster speeds as we seem to be generating ever larger reports- a recent one was 139.6 MB.  I happened to find out that my service provider (I am not on a network with any involvement from our company, WideOpen Networks) had lowered their pricing. I called and found out that I could could get symmetric Gig service for less than I had been paying for symmetric 500 Mbps service - which proves there is nothing like competition to drive down prices.

I quickly signed up for symmetric Gig service and within a couple of days I was disappointed with the speeds that I was getting. This is not my first time around the Internet block and I have a good idea of what speeds the networks that we build deliver. I had been getting close to 480 Mbps up and down with my 500 Mbps hard-wired connection via our Gig Ethernet switch. With my new Gig services, my hard-wired speeds were rarely above 680 Mbps up and down. I called customer service and got the  suggestion that it was just overhead from my network. She told me switching to a different router would have little impact.

Luckily, I have a son who is a system administrator and network architect. I called him and he explained to me that the advice of a few years ago to buy your own router was outdated. He said new inexpensive chips allow fiber service providers to lease to customers excellent high-end routers that are more than capable of providing great speeds and reliability for home users.

I was initially skeptical since my very reliable Google router with mesh network was only two or three years old, but I did some research. I found out that my provider was using Calix Gigasphere routers which I knew were on the short list for ones that we are planning on offering for own WideOpen Networks’ customers.

That sealed the deal.  I called up and arranged to get one of the Calix routers. A few days later the technician arrived and just as I hope our technicians are, he was even five minutes early. I had the name and password of my old WiFi network ready. That was important since we have twenty-five devices on our network, many of them wireless, ranging from my original Kindle Fire to our garage door opener. The technician unplugged the old Google router and plugged in the new Calix one. I downloaded the CommandIQ app from the Google Play store to my smartphone, created a new account, logged into it, gave the new WiFi network the exact same name and password as the old one. Next we tested the wired connection on one of my hard-wired computers. Even at noon the speeds were a huge improvement.

Then I did wireless tests that mostly involved me running the network speed test on the Calix CommandIQ app in every room. The wireless tested fine. Even better than the speeds, there seems to be no need for a mesh network. All our devices worked fine, including our LG television, the iPads, the Chromebooks, all our Macs, Windows computers, even my Linux computer and the WiFi on both our smartphones. I did not get locked out because I still able to open our WiFi-enabled garage door using my smartphone. Our speeds are now regularly in the high 800 Mbps even during busy times of the day. In the not so busy times, we hit over 900 Mbps.

You can go crazy running speed tests especially if you are trying to do it wirelessly with computers and have no idea what kind of WiFi connectivity that the computer has. I easily ran over half a dozen different speed tests and never got the same result twice. As my son likes to say, at speeds of anything over 500 Mbps per second, there is either something between you and the test server impacting performance or the server cannot handle higher data rates. In any case with a new router it is more than likely something beyond your network keeping your from hitting over 900 Mbps.

Good advice is sometimes hard to come by but I think that I am safe in saying that if you have fiber and your speeds are not where they should be, maybe it is time to look at one of the routers supported by your service provider. If they are good fiber provider, you will likely be pleased with the results and there will be no pointing fingers at equipment since it came from the service provider.

- David Sobotta, VP of Sales

Streaming your choice of video channels is what the future holds. I spend a good chunk of my day job looking at the prices of Internet services across the country.

Blacksburg, Virginia, 02/21/2022

I studied cable, DSL, and fiber services in dozens of counties and communities last year. That along with my personal experience with prices and as an early streamer starting several years ago has helped our family to continue to save money after switching from cable and its expensive packages to fiber and streaming services.

However, it is easy to go overboard with streaming. The grandchildren show up and their favorite shows are on Disney+, so you subscribe. An older child comes home and wants some Apple TV channels. It only takes three or four spur of moment decisions added to your regular streaming services and you will be paying more than you would be for a cable package.

The way we handle our streaming services is to keep them on a budget. We budget $40 monthly for streaming services. We are Amazon Prime members so I am not sure we would allocate the full $8.99 (stand-alone cost) for Prime video but as you will see, even when we do that, we are still well under budget.

Our four current services for a fee are Prime Video at $8.99 monthly, Paramount+ $5.99 monthly, Britbox $6.99 monthly, and PBS Masterpiece $5.99 monthly for a total of $32.96 for all our streaming services. We also subscribe to the free version of Peacock. I recently canceled Netflix and Acorn while adding Masterpiece and Britbox.

We stream so much that it is easy to run out of new, watchable programs in two to three months. I manage all but one of our channels on Amazon prime so it is easy to see them and the costs all in one place. You also have the advantage of being able to snare some Amazon specials like HBO Max or Starz for $1.99 a month for two months. You just have to remember to cancel them. The picture at the top of the post is what you see in Amazon’s Video channels management console.

My studies across the country along the current Hulu and YouTube pricing I see tell me that about $70 a month will get you a full range of video services. So if you are paying $70 or more for your streaming services, you are not saving money and it is time to go on a streaming budget.

- David Sobotta, VP of Sales

100+ countries are together for a better internet and world. For home & school programs in the US #SID2022

Blacksburg, Virginia, 02/08/2022

Tuesday, Feb. 8 is Safer Internet Day, which will be celebrated this year in over 100 countries. ConnectSafely, the official US host, spoke to parents, educators and young people across the country to find out what’s on their minds when it comes to online safety and wellbeing in 2022. They took the questions and concerns — and a few of their own — to experts in online safety, parenting, bullying prevention, security, and executives at popular apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Roblox. The results were some great conversations with a wealth of advice and insights.

Visit https://saferinternetday.us/ for details, programs and additional resources for parents, guardians, teachers and students.