View from the Mountain

A New Router, Just What The Geek Ordered

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 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.

On The Edge of the Continent

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is already in Onslow County, just across the river from our home in Carteret County and in Craven County, another adjoining county so we know it is coming.  For just a while longer life here still revolves around the waters, fields, and forests that cover most of the county. Spring is definitely here and we might be doing some social distancing on the water soon.

I work at home like I have for most of my professional career. Social distancing is not going to change that work routine. Our company builds community fiber networks. While this virus will likely be good for our long-term business, no one wants their business to grow this way. Still, the coronavirus may be the shove needed for our country to get serious about fiber to the home which enables or improves a variety of services including telemedicine. We all might desperately need better connectivity in the next few weeks.

While I am worried about our local community which has not completely recovered from Florence, I remain optimistic because this is not your average place.

We moved to Carteret County, North Carolina fourteen years ago. The county is 62% water. The Croatan National Forest and its 158,000 acres are a buffer from most civilization. The almost untouched 56 miles of Cape Lookout National Seashore lies to the east. The 240 square miles Cape Lejeune covers our west flank and the Atlantic Ocean is our border to the south. We did not come to the county to get away from people, but people like the water in our big sounds and rivers are spread mighty thin.

My forty-year-old son declared while visiting us a few years ago that we were living on the edge of civilization. He lives in Northern Virginia, a land of epic traffic jams on multi-lane roads. Highway 58, the main access to the area, is just two lanes as it slices through miles of pine forest, pocosins and fields. It remains two lanes as it crosses the two-mile-long Cameron Langston Bridge to the beaches. It is not my son's favorite road.

As uncrowded as our area is, we are no strangers to challenges. Being on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks, we have survived our fair share of hurricanes. Our schools were closed for two weeks for Florence which just happens to be the time Governor Cooper closed them for the coronavirus on March 14.

Saturday, March 14, was also scheduled to be the kick-off of our annual outdoor festival season with the Saint Patrick's Day Festival on Emerald Isle. It brings over 30,000 people to our little beach town which has a year-round population of under 3,700 people. It's cancellation this year is a big blow to the local economy. Emerald Isle, the largest of the area beach towns grows to 50,000 people briefly in the summer.  On March 19, Carteret County asked visitors not to come to the beaches. The same day Emerald Isle closed its public access beach parking.

That we are always prepared for the summer surge of people might make us hopefully a little better positioned to do well in the early stages of this crisis. If some areas are food deserts, we are a food oasis. We have six large modern grocery stores within five miles. They're virtually deserted from October until early May. Wednesday night I visited the Emerald Isle Publix, my car was the only one in the customer parking lot. While we have seen some shortages, it appears they are so far minor. One store might have eggs and/or bread, another hamburger, and another chicken.

Carteret County is also a farming area that grows a tremendous amount of produce. Rumor has it that a few farmers are already picking this year's first strawberries.  We know from the past, strawberries will be ripe and widely available in a couple of weeks. There are still people here like us with home gardens. We will enjoy our first lettuce from the garden this week. Many of our other services are designed to handle a short summer surge of business and hardly any of our storefronts shut down for the winter. All of that is good for today.

The long term outlook is unlikely to be so rosy. A coronavirus shock to tourism on top of a slow recovery from Florence will be tough on many small businesses that struggle to survive the winter so they can thrive for a few summertime weeks. A big hit to the early rental season makes our coastal area even more vulnerable to late-season Hurricane scares that also drive tourists away. We have already lost a number of restaurants and the ones that have gone to the expense of rebuilding definitely are going to be hurt by the recent closures.

Watching coronavirus is a little like watching a hurricane as it slowly makes its way towards your area. However, the analogy breaks down quickly since the drill most of us have internalized for hurricanes helps us little against a virus that we cannot see.

With coronavirus, we are following the government directives as we do for hurricanes. We trust that will make us safe.  Carteret County has good information available.  We remain hopeful even better instructions and wide-spread testing will follow. While our location is somewhat isolated, perhaps we are well enough connected to the rest of the world to learn from others' mistakes.

When we put our house on the market last year, we were excited to be moving closer to our grandchildren in the Charlotte metro area. Maybe the slow real estate season has turned out to be a blessing. Carteret County might be a good place to ride out the coronavirus storm. I cannot get very interested in looking for a new home right now.

Success Working from Home

I have been working from home for most of my adult life.  Lots of people joke about how you can goof off while working from home. Fortunately, I have worked in enough offices to know that the biggest goof-offs usually show up at the office every day and leave without ever accomplishing anything. 

Being successful is not defined by your work environment, it is in your hands.

Even before the coronavirus, there were plenty of benefits that might accrue to you if you work from home. However, many of them are closely intertwined with having the right office, good equipment, and the temperament to work from a home office.

For over ten years, we had a cattle farm and while I had a home office for a couple of weeks out of the year during tax season, most of my time was spent on a tractor.  In 1981, we dispersed our cattle, and I got my first home office job.  It is good that I waited until then because it was nearly impossible to do the job without a computer and Apple II+s like I bought were just starting to land on desktops. That job only lasted six months but it led to my first go-to-the-office-every-day job, selling Apple computers and managing the salespeople in five distinct offices.

After two years of that, I landed at Apple and my career of being in the office occasionally while mostly working from home began in earnest. In the next twenty years, I rapidly moved up to the corporate ladder and eventually became director of federal sales. Even then I was rarely in the office more than half the workdays of a month.  I actually credit my home office as one of the reasons that I managed to last nearly twenty years at Apple. Sometimes having some geographic separation from upper management is a good thing.

Technology evolving from email on a mainframe to email on your phone and every other imaginable device has made working from home much easier over the years. Here is a list of what has helped me be successful.

1. Having a dedicated, private physical space has been an unwavering success factor for me. You cannot do great work until you are in a space where you can concentrate.
2. Developing the technical skills to support yourself in your company's specific environment is really important.  You are not going to thrive if you are always calling someone for help.
3. Using the right equipment to match your needs and the requirements of your company is essential.
4. Creating a routine that matches the needs of your company can actually help you do better than office-bound personnel.
5. Communicating frequently and often with others in and outside your company is a lifeline to sanity and success.

At times the right equipment can be daunting.  When I started managing an Apple higher education team in 1993, my office had three phone lines, one for talking, one for a data connection and another for someone calling in when I was on the other line. Creating a network in the early days was no picnic and there was no cloud for storage or collaboration.

Today, Slack, one phone line, and a reasonable Internet connection handle my communications needs. It would be even better if I had a fiber connection with symmetric up and down speed for better video conferencing.

I have found that having multiple computers is a benefit. Because I can get pulled in different directions, I like just being able to swing my chair around to another task. My desks have two Macs, one Windows 10 machine, and one Linux box.  I have my own NAS, three printers, and a scanner. I did my own Ethernet cabling when we built this addition where my new office is but most people might be fine with wireless. My office uses wired Ethernet. I wouldn't have it any other way. My own personal computer is a Google Pixelbook which almost never comes to my office. Keeping personal and work computers separate also helps. 

I keep slightly offset hours compared to our CEO. That means when he is at lunch, I can work on materials that need to be finished with a joint effort later in the day.

Being successful in a home office does not require putting on a suit every day, but it does demand sticking to what needs to be done, using the right tools, and approaching the job with the right mindset.  I have been very successful with shorts and a t-shirt for many years.  I don't miss the ties or the modems of the early years.

 

Opportunity Based Action

David & Matt at Blacksburg Fiber Cabinet

The third week in April of 2018, I was fortunate to be part of a group gathered in the hopes of sharing information, ideas, and plans to achieve better broadband in the state of North Carolina.

We go to conferences to be with people who think like we do. When you get together with your tribe, it energizes you. People talk your language.  They value the same things that you do. Sometimes conferences come up with ideas that lead to change.

I came back feeling like there were lots of people who believe what I believe. None of the people at the conference needed to be convinced of the importance of high-quality broadband in North Carolina's future. They were all trying to understand how they could make it happen.  They also understood almost to a person that most of us do not have competition in broadband.  Usually, we have a choice of one provider and often their offerings are designed more for entertainment than for business usage.

I love the analogy given by Grant Goings, the city manager, from Wilson, NC.  Wilson for those who do not know built their own fiber network only to have the state legislature try to make it illegal. While they finally got grandfathered, lobbyists made it impossible for other cities to do what Wilson has done.

Grant told us to imagine that we lived on private dirt toll road owned by a company.  He said to think about going to the private company and begging them to pave your road only to have them say no because it would not make them more money. Then he said suppose you went out and built your own superhighway right beside the dirt toll road only to have the state legislature tell you that you couldn't drive on it and had to keep driving on the dirt road. Those are the roadblocks Wilson had to overcome. I think we were told that 650 technology jobs have come to town in the last year. They credit their fiber network and competitively priced fast Internet access.

This conference was all about helping communities figure out ways to build their own fiber superhighways so that their citizens will not be left behind as cities get better and better connections to the Internet.  The important thing to remember is that those communities who work to build their own community networks often end up with better connectivity than cities around them.  That means this is not a battle that rural communities have lost yet.  It is battle that will be lost unless people mobilize and demand their leaders takes steps to bring fiber to their communities. It does not take forever to get fiber. Our company built 23 miles of fiber in Bozeman, Montana in six months.

Just as the Interstate Highway system and the railroads before it created winners and losers, the world of fiber is going to leave communities behind.  Places like Danville, Virginia jumped on the fiber bandwagon over a decade ago. They had been hit by the perfect storm of a collapse of the furniture, tobacco, and textile industries that defined their economy. Their electric utility built a fiber network and now Danville has a thriving economy with far more technology jobs than in the past.

I am lucky to work in a job that aligns with my passion for better broadband with my job description. The company that I work for has been helping communities take control of their economic future by working towards community controlled networks for twenty-five years. It is easy to wake up in the morning and go to work doing something that can make a real difference in people's lives.

Like the analogy that was used at the conference, this is a lot like rural electrification.  The cities got electricity because it was easy for private companies to make a profit there.  It was much harder outside the cities because the customers were much farther apart. That is why we had the Rural Electrification Act.  There is no simple answer for each community but there are answers and solutions that be put in place to position a community for the future without breaking the bank. The good news is that banks and others are starting to understand how fiber is to a community's future.

Fiber also makes financial sense for individual users. I have done the numbers time and again. If I could switch to one of the community networks that we have built, any upfront costs that I pay would be covered in fifteen months by the resulting savings from my getting out of the grip of the cable monopoly. After that initial period, my savings quickly start to mount up.  Connecting a home to fiber is a better investment than remodeling your kitchen.

I remain optimistic that North Carolina will take up this challenge which former Governor Hunt likened to the challenge of getting all the state's dirt roads paved.  I lived on a dirt road so I can relate. I remember the roads of my childhood being paved and I remember before they were paved that school had to be canceled in the winter sometimes because the roads were too muddy for buses.

This conference was a refreshing change for a year that seems destined to be defined by not so nice politics. Not a single person during the conference mentioned a party label. I did not have a clue about the political stripe of the one state representative who spoke.  Even if I had not known, it would have been a safe bet to assume the former governor, James Hunt, who spoke was a Democrat.  NC has only elected three Republican governors in the last one hundred years. I also knew our current governor, Roy Cooper, was a Democrat but none of that mattered since everyone was focused on the issue at hand, better broadband.

I hope this is a sign that everyone can work together on issues that have the potential to change our lives for the better.