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.