The Pitch on Wicked Fiber

Today Pitch Weekly published a comprehensive piece about Wicked Broadband's initiative to bring fiber to Lawrence.

It accurately describes Wicked's proposal and exposes the lack of experience and past failures of RG Fiber founder Mike Bosch.

It is nice to finally see an independent and comprehensive story.

Two ultra-small startups duel to sell ultra-fast broadband in Lawrence.

Wicked Broadband Annual Service Discount

This year we are once again running a special for our long term customers who want to save on their Internet service in 2015.

The first twenty customers who purchase 1 year of service in advance will get two months free.

We figure if you are going to be buying service all year anyway, why not do it all at once and save a few bucks?

Annual Costs Annual Service Discount:

Basic Service - $399.79 (Save $79.76)

Advanced/Rural Service - $499.80 (Save $99.96)

Business/Bulk (Call (785) 371-4214 )

Please note these prices do NOT include the 5% special municipal fee.

Anyone who is interested, please send an e-mail ( billing.lfn@wickedbroadband.com ) and let me know it is okay to bill your card or take payment via ACH.  Be sure to include the full name of the account holder.

You can also contact Lionell at (785) 371-4214 between 10 AM and 6 PM weekdays.

Thank you and happy holidays.

New Offices

Our offices have moved.  We are now at 925 Iowa St, Ste R.

Feel free to come by between 10AM and 6PM weekdays.

Fiber Line Cut

We had a fiber line cut today by a City of Lawrence vendor. As of now most of the repairs have been made. They are working to make the last repairs and hope to have us completely up shortly. Please call the office if you are still experiencing problems, 785-371-4214.

Lafayette, LA Fiber Initiative Creates Another 1,600 Local Jobs

Lafayette fiber initiative recently drew 3 additional companies to the community. In total, these three companies, Percipient, Inc, CGI and Emquero are adding 1,045 new jobs. These new positions will create another 602 indirect jobs in the community.

Fiber optic Internet works as a catalyst for economic growth. It helps communities to grow their existing businesses and attract new businesses.

http://www.muninetworks.org/content/three-new-companies-move-silicon-bayou

Our Own Kris Adair

I am very proud of my wife and co-owner Kris Adair for standing up for local entrepreneurs and startups here in Lawrence.

Her idea to re-focus our economic development spending on entrepreneurship and startups appears to have legs.  The EDC is implementing it and I couldn't be more supportive.

If you care about building a future for Lawrence that includes local companies and opportunities for entrepreneurship, you should take a look.

Gigabit in Lawrence's North West

Today we put up a gigabit hotspot at EATS restaurant at 6th & Fireside Ct. in Lawrence. EATS is inside the Miller Mart where Basil Cafe used to be before they moved to 9th St.

The site has both a 802.11ac hotspot and a wired wall port for you to plug your laptop into. The speedtest below is from the 802.11ac WiFi hotspot.

If you think Internet service like this would benefit your business or give you an edge while gaming at home, please join us at City Hall on September 9 at 6:30 PM to let your elected officials know.

Try a Gigabit for Yourself!

Folks interested in seeing what Gigabit Internet service looks like can visit Wicked Fiber's first public gigabit demo site - Z's Devine Espresso at 23rd & Harper.

Z's has been a customer for a while, but today got upgraded to Wicked's Gigabit Fiber service.

Be sure to get a taste of Z's excellent coffee while you are drinking a flood of data from their Gigabit hotspot.

To get the Full Monty you'll need an 802.11ac enabled device.  This will enable you to get full use of the bandwidth at the site.  Simply connect to "Wicked Fiber Hotspot" and you'll be good to go.

802.11b/g/n devices can still connect, but they need to use the legacy "Z's Hotspot" SSID.

Here is a speedtest from the site:

If you are interested in getting these types of speeds to your home, please be sure to come and voice your opinion at City Hall on September 9 at 6:30 PM.

Bringing Gigabit to Lawrence

The time is finally here. On September 9, 2014 at 6:30 PM the Wicked Fiber ultra high speed broadband project we've been working on for the past 16 months is up for a final vote at City Commission.

I'm writing today to let you know that despite approval from the City's Public Incentives Review Committee, passage of the necessary regulatory changes and financial support by our City Commission is uncertain.

As one of our pre-registered Wicked Fiber members, your attendance will be instrumental in securing the support of the City of Lawrence.

If you can make the meeting, we'd love to have you there. Your opinion matters. Our City Commission needs to hear how important Internet infrastructure is to the future of our community, they need to see that the community wants 21st century Internet infrastructure.

Please join us Sept 9 at 6:30 PM to make your views known.

For more information or to show your support, visit us on Facebook:
http://goo.gl/PXwP29

or Eventbrite:
http://goo.gl/RjdRHO

Get Gigabit Speeds at YOUR Home

You may have missed it, but a couple months ago, Chanute announced it would spend $13 Million in public funds to build a fiber-to-the home network.



Looks like parts of it are already up and running. The speedtest below is between our newest sorority customer, Alpha Chi Omega and Chanute Kansas.

Right now Lawrence is 27th in the state for Internet speeds, despite hosting one of the fastest ISPs in the United States.

Simply put this is because Wicked cannot access the capital it needs to expand this service to every resident. We are too small for Wall Street to have interest and FDIC won't let Main St. banks lend with a network as collateral.

If you want this kind of service at your home, please come out and support us at City Hall on Sept 9 at 6:30 PM. All we are asking for is a loan guarantee - a mechanism that allows us to use the Bank's money on advantageous terms to build a network for our entire community to use.

Please Help to Prevent Suicide

You may not know, but in addition to providing free Internet service for Headquarters Counseling Center - a suicide prevention organization, Wicked Broadband donates $200/Month to Headquarters to help facilitate their mission.

With the tragic death of Robin Williams yesterday in the news, we would like to encourage our members to donate to this important cause.

My military unit has seen two suicides in the past year and due to funding cuts at the City of Lawrence and State of Kansas, many social service organizations are struggling to obtain the resources they need to fulfill their mission.

If you are interested in helping to prevent suicide, I would like to encourage you to donate:
Headquarters Counseling Center

Storm Recovery

First off I'd like to point out that folks on our fiber network have experienced no problems at all. They have been seeing hundreds of megabits per second of service and have been entirely uninterrupted. If you want gigabit fiber to your home (and vastly more reliable service at a price similar to what you are paying now), please don't hesitate to come out and support us at City Hall on Sept 9 @ 6:30 PM.

We've been putting in a lot of hours the past two days and are now within striking distance of getting our network squared away.

We ended up losing 2 tower sectors to lightning, one at 1800 Kasold and another at 11th & Mass. In addition, we had two pieces of equipment damaged in a way that caused them to flood our network with traffic. This is what has been causing flaky service near 23rd & Kasold, 19th & Mass and 23rd & Haskel.

We had substantial damage to our equipment at Poehler Lofts as well, but have just about squared that site away as well.

We are now down to chasing street level sites. We are hoping to have all of these up and running by late this evening.

We are planing on starting on single family homes some time tomorrow. Lionell will be contacting folks and working out dates and times.

August 6 Storms

The current lightning storm is has damaged a number of sites around Lawrence, with heavy damage NE of 23rd & Kasold. We will be reporting at dawn tomorrow (0630) and aim to have the network back to nominal by sundown. Thank you for your patience as God punishes the Wicked.

Yesterday's Storms

We just finished cleaning up after yesterday's storms. If you are having problems, please don't hesitate to call us and let us know: (785) 371 - 4214

Outage on 23rd St

Internet is out on 23rd St from Iowa to Alabama. The City of Lawrence removed our 23rd & Iowa relay without providing adequate notice. Our crew is on site trying to work out some kind of temporary solution so we can keep customers online. We are trying to get a hold of the responsible parties at the City to find out what the heck happened.

Welcome Supersonic Music!

We'd like to welcome Supersonic Music as our newest business customer.

Supersonic was making use of our *FREE* WiFi hotspots on Mass St., but wanted to upgrade to more reliable service.

Here is a speedtest from the site:

New DNS Settings

Unlike most ISPs, Wicked Broadband doesn't provide e-mail hosting, web hosting, backups and other services ISPs commonly provide.

We stay away from this because we view the role of an ISP as a provider of a neutral pipe that connects your home or business to the Internet.

We describe our business as moving 1s and 0s from point A to point B for a daily, weekly, monthly or annual fee.

With this in mind, we have decided to get out of the business of providing domain name resolution (DNS).  Many other companies are offering free DNS services that are faster and more reliable than anything we can provide.

Customers who get their IP address from us automatically (most of our customers) don't need to worry about this, however, customers that have static IP address assignments should change their DNS settings to the following settings:

DNS1 74.82.42.42

DNS2 8.8.4.4

DNS3 208.67.222.222

If you don't know what I am talking about, don't worry about it.  Your IPs are likely set automagically and you can ignore this message.

UPS Issues.....

One of our primary Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) units died on us today after 7 years of loyal service.

As a result we had two brief outages that effected a good chunk of our network (around 40%).  One at noon when the unit failed and another at 1700 when a breaker blew on the replacement circuit.

We've addressed the issue and shouldn't have any more unplanned down time due to this failure.  Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers.

On the end of Net Neutrality

The FCC today voted to implement rules that will allow ISPs to discriminate against traffic that doesn't enhance their bottom line.

This means that AT&T, Comcast and yes, even WoW! will be able to set up Internet fast lanes for "revenue enhancing" customers at the expense of other services.

This is a huge change in how the Internet has historically worked.  It means a shift from an Internet where anyone can set up a website or service to an Internet where only "major players" will be able to create and deploy new and novel websites and applications.

It means the Internet "free and open" model will move toward the "closed and exclusive" model we see in Cable TV.  Companies that provide services that compete with cable (like Netflix for example) will be forced to pay Cable TV companies a toll in order to move their content. 

Where will the fee come from?  Your pocket.

Lets say you subscribe to Comcast for example.  You pay Comcast to bring you Internet traffic from everyone on the Internet.  Lets say you subscribe to Netflix too.  Well then part of your Netflix bill will be used to pay Comcast to provide Internet traffic to you.

So Comcast gets paid twice.  Once by you directly, and once indirectly through your Netflix bill.

If a company is trying to start a service that competes with Netflix, they will have to negotiate passage with Comcast first, then they will need to advertise and compete for customers, then they will have to negotiate with content owners (a major content owner is Comcast by the way).  A very tall order and one of the reasons why over the top (OTT) television is not available here in the United States.

We here at Wicked Broadband oppose this change.  It will be bad for consumers, bad for the Internet and ultimately bad for American innovation.  The growth of Information Technology companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others has been a ray of light in a world where traditional American manufacturers are shrinking.  This change will all but ensure that future innovation on the web takes place outside of the USA.

I'd like to encourage you to contact the FCC and let them know that you oppose this rule change.  As long as you are paying your ISP for Internet service, all of that traffic should be treated the same.

You can comment by filling out this form.  The proceeding number is 14-28: FCC Comment Form

Special Thanks....

Special thanks to Lionell and Travis for all of the hard work they've been doing the past couple days.

Storm damage is the bane of our spring season, but they've visited over 40 sites that were damaged by lightning, wind and water.  They are down to 10 sites as of this evening and may have the network back to nominal by tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks for the hard work guys.

Yep, We're a Small Family Business

Joshua is going to be away from work for a couple weeks due to an emergency in our family.

We've also recently had some personnel changes and so our new technician hasn't finished his training.

Since we are so short handed, we've decided to suspend new customer installations through May 18.

We'll resume installations at that time.

We apologize for any inconvenience.  The down side to working with small locally owned businesses is that they have very little depth in any given position.  The up side is that you get personal attention (our customers are names, not numbers) and you can get the owner on the phone if you want to.

AT&T Gigabit - How do you build a fiber network without any capital expenditure?

An interesting article on AT&T's planned fiber projects in DSL Reports today.

It looks like AT&T is talking about putting in gigabit service, but hasn't actually budgeted any funds to build it.

Bill Gates.....

Bill Gates gets a dollar every time a Windows machine makes a user cry.

Overnight Slowdowns

As the weather yesterday worsened, many of our members retreated to their homes to watch Netflix or Hulu.

This brought our upstream link to its maximum capacity last night around 9 PM and it stayed their till a little after midnight.  Connections weren't being dropped, they just became slower than they normally are.

We have an outstanding order with our upstream provider to increase our upstream capacity, but unfortunately they can't get this order fulfilled before the KU and Haskell students leave on May 16.

The take-away from this is that the network is going to be slow from around 10:00 PM to Midnight until May 16.  During the summer we will be bringing new capacity online and will have plenty of excess capacity by the time the students return in August.

We appreciate your patience in this matter and will work hard to continue to communicate both our capabilities and our limitations so that our customers know what to expect.

Storm Damage Repair

All of the known damage from Sunday's storms has been repaired.  We still have a couple of sites we are working on minor issues with, but all-in-all everything is up and running.

Storm Related Damage

We are fighting spring storms again today.  We've got a couple of sites offiline right now.  We will be working to bring these back online when the storms clear in a couple hours:

Down Sites:
27th & Bluestem
Meadowbrooke Bldg CC

We've also lost the equipment that serves the fiber on the 1400 block of Tennessee.  This area is on a backup link for now.  We will be deploying replacement equipment tomorrow and should have this area back on its primary (1.4 Gbps) infrastructure some time tomorrow.

Wicked Broadband Featured in ArsTechnica

Wicked Broadband is being featured again today in ArsTechnica

One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard

Electrical Outage

Westar is showing 2,319 addresses offline right now.  All of our core sites are working fine (6th St. is on generator power), but we have a lot of small sites in local neighborhoods that are offline.

Most of these will come back up when power is restored, but it will be a day or so before we restore power to each and every site.

Thanks for your patience as we work to restore service.

Props to Lionell & Dan

A power adapter at our 18th & Kasold site started freaking out two days ago and has been causing intermittent issues for folks who live in and around Meadowbrooke Apts.

It went down for good yesterday evening at 5:45 PM or so.

I'd like to thank Lionell for staying late, doing a tower climb and fixing the issue after hours.

You might know Lionell as the friendly gentleman you speak to on the phone if your call our offices.  What you might not know is that he has a background in military radio communications and helps with field work on a regular basis.

Everyone on our technology team takes a turn as the on-call operator once every three weeks.  They give up their weekends and time with their families to keep the network running.  I'd like to thank both Dan and Lionell for the hard work they do day in and day out to keep the network running smoothly.

DDoS

We've been the target of distributed denial of service attacks on a couple occasions in the past week.

We just experienced an attack at around 12:22 PM today.  We contacted our upstream carrier and had the attack mitigated by 12:26 PM.

For folks who are interested in what these attacks are, here is a link.  They are relatively easy to mitigate once we've identified the target, but can cause momentary inconvenience while we work to identify the problem.

Business Service

Just installed new business service at Midwest Property Management.

Speedtesting 1 Gbps service is difficult, but here is the results at this site:



If your business Internet is too slow, why not give us a call?  (785) 371 4214

Network Congestion

We've identified a point of network congestion that is slowing traffic down as we reach our peak usage around 11 PM.

Looking at network traffic, it appears that we've had slowdowns from around 10:00 PM to midnight each of the last two nights (since the students returned from spring break).

I've purchased a server to better manage traffic at the point of congestion and am configuring it as I write this.

I am going to try to be slick and bring this server online at 6:00 PM today, but if I can't do it without causing a network outage I'll need to install it and change the requisite routes at around 4:00 AM tomorrow.

That means another slowdown tonight from 10:00 PM to Midnight.

Thank you for your patience as we work to improve service for everyone.

Startup Lawrence

We are happy to support Lawrence Kids Calendar, Tallgrass Legal, Whobaloo, Utopia Development and other members of the Lawrence startup community.

If you are an entrepreneur with a business idea, are thinking about starting your own business, or just want to hang out and drink beer with a bunch of entrepreneurs who quit their day jobs, I'd encourage you to join the Lawrence Startup Facebook group.

Lawrence can be a great place for entrepreneurship.  Lets make it happen.

Coming Soon - Over The Air TV

I am sitting in the office watching the new over the air TV product we are bringing to our Lawrence users.

It runs as a channel on the Roku set top box and will include all of the broadcast channels from the Kansas City market.

Pretty neat stuff.  We are working contracts now.  Expect a big announcement in the next month or two.

Welcome Boys & Girls Club!

The Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence is our newest non-profit member.

Boys and Girls Club got 100% free installation, 100% free equipment and will receive 100% free service for years to come.

This will help to free up much needed financial resources for other important programs.

We are proud to provide this service to Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence and dozens of other non-profits, charities and low income households in our community.

Do you know of a non-profit that might benefit from free Internet service?  We are happy to provide free services for local non-profits as a way to help them meet the needs of our community.  Have them drop us a line to see if we can help.

Wicked Broadband on ArsTechnica

Our project here in Lawrence has now taken the national stage.

Lawrence - a national leader in broadband access.

4 TB Per Day Reached - Upgrade Planned

On January 9, 2012 our network reached 1 TeraByte of daily traffic for the first time. 16 months later we doubled that throughput and reached 2 TeraBytes of data per day.

In November of 2013, we reached 3 TeraBytes of data per day and, since everyone stayed home today and watched Netflix, today we reached 4 TeraBytes of traffic. This is double the traffic we were moving in May of last year.

In case you are wondering, we ordered new capacity in December in anticipation of growing network loads. This capacity is scheduled to come online on March 7. The new capacity will more than double the amount of traffic we can move each day. That's good because at the rate we are going, we may be moving as much as 8 TeraBytes per day by August 2014.

VERY IMPORTANT!! SB 304

The Kansas Senate has introduced SB 304 which makes it illegal for cities and counties to build broadband networks.  It also makes it illegal for them to participate in joint ventures like Google Fiber.

Please take a moment to read about it and to take action to let your legislators know what an awful idea this is:

https://www.facebook.com/kansansforbroadbandaccess

This is very important.  Without access to municipal facilities and fiber, projects like ours are simply not possible.  This bill will effectively kill all municipal networks in Kansas and will cede the entire telecommunications industry to the incumbent phone and cable providers.

Op-Ed

I wrote an Op-Ed and submitted it to a couple of national news sites today. If no one bites after a few days or a week, I'll publish it here. If someone does bite, I'll link the article so you can see it.

 I've been giving a lot of thought to how we can build Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) networks both here and in the rest of the country. I've come up with at least one good idea. We'll see if one of their editors agrees.

Wind Damage

Looking at our monitoring system it looks like we've lost 3 sites so far tonight (out of 800+ sites).  Two sites north of peterson drive and one near Meadowbrooke Apts.

 Dan will chase these down first thing the the morning.

 EDIT: January 27 - Dan busted his tail today and got every single site back up despite the cold weather. If you appreciate Dan and Lionell and all the hard work they do, tell them that the next time you talk to one of them.

Things are speeding up........

The new architecture in central Lawrence is starting to pay off.

We doubled the size of our core fiber bus over break and cleaned up our switching equipment to reduce latency and increase bandwidth.

 Here is a speedtest from one of our residential Gigabit fiber customers:

 

We currently have a plan to bring this level of service to our entire community and are looking forward to working with our friends at City hall to make it happen.

Wicked Broadband Public Incentives Review Committee Presentation

For those of you who might be interested, here is the presentation we are giving at PIRC today.

http://prezi.com/xf6jmbmpiv9f

Final Speedtests for CWC

We've changed our name with ARIN from "Community Wireless Communications, Co." to "Wicked Broadband".

As a result, netindex.com has re-started our company history.  We've asked them to keep the data from CWC, but it might not be possible.

So here is the last comparison of the ISPs in Kansas from the period July 17, 2011 to January 15, 2014.

Notice how much our network has improved.  Our fiber customers are now seeing real throughput of 300, 400 even 800 Mbps.

Quite an improvement from our humble beginnings with a 6 Mbps DSL line and a dream.

EDIT: After talking to Ookla it looks like our results won't be added back into the standings for at least a couple days, maybe as much as a month.

We recently upgraded our upstream link and changed out the configuration of our network core, so it will be interesting to see where we start out with the new DBA.

I'd like to be faster than Google Fiber (and in our fiber sites we are), but we still have a lot of legacy sites that are never going to get past 50 Mbps, so we'll likely have to settle for second place (for now).

Maintenance Windows, Working on the Network Core

We are going to be doing significant work on our network core over the next week.

The goal is to lower latency, increase throughput and simplify our network core.

Over the past 5 years or so, our core has grown organically.  That means we've installed switching equipment, routers and links according to the immediate needs of our customers and not according to any pre-planned architecture.

The result is a setup that is getting increasingly complex and, in some parts, doesn't make sense any longer.  It also means we've got odd bandwidth constraints that are not allowing us to make full use of the theoretical capacity of our network.

To address these problems we are going to be making changes from 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM every day this week:

Our target windows are:
Monday January 13 - 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM
Tuesday January 14 - 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM
Wednesday January 15 - 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM
Thursday January 16 - 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM
Friday January 17 - 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM

We are going to try and keep down time to a minimum, but if you are using the network during these times, don't be surprised if there are intermittent outages.

Broadband Mapping Reply

Every so often we get a request from the State of Kansas to provide information on our coverage area so that they can update their maps for the NTIA.

They ask us to respond even if our response is that we are not going to participate.

Here is our response to their most recent request:

-------------------------------------------------

Dear Eileen,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

The problem with this survey is that it causes incumbent carriers to overstate their coverage and mis-represents the availability of broadband services.  Rural Douglas County, for example, shows that multiple ISPs provide "broadband" service even though there are large sections of the County where there are no Internet Service Providers at all.

The reasons for this are threefold.

1. Broadband is defined as 768 Kbps.
2. So called "4G" mobile providers are allowed to represent their products as acceptable for fixed broadband applications.
3. By overstating coverage, incumbents guarantee that no federal or state funds will be made available near their service area.

As a result, the survey you are conducting ( and others like it ) have the effect of cementing the arguments of incumbent providers that the US broadband market is healthy, that there is lots of competition and that consumers have a choice of multiple providers.

Since our goal as an organization has always been to expand broadband access, your survey works against our goal.  For this reason we decline to participate.

If you would like to discuss how our state might develop a broadband map that accurately reflects the availability of broadband (defined as capable of streaming at least 1 HD video stream), I would be happy to participate.

Thank you,

Joshua Montgomery

Utility Pole Down

A vehicle struck our pole at 28th & Harper taking down service to much of the neighborhood.  Crews are on site and we hope to have service back up tonight, tomorrow at the latest.