Fiber Internet

In 2009, when I first installed our phone at the house the very first phone call was from Verizon - "We are installing fiber in your neighborhood very soon, if you are interested in buying Verizon Fios press 1 now".  You better believe I smashed the 1 touchtone button as hard as I could.  Having had Charter Cable internet at my previous house in Hurst, (and before that getting one of the very first SDSL lines in Grapevine) I wasn't used to not having high speed internet available.

You see, where I live (until incredibly recently) was considered "the country".  There is no cable.  There is no DSL.  There is no sewer.  The water and power company are Co-Ops.  I was one of the "lucky" ones that was able to get point to point microwave internet service, and the only one in the neighborhood until a couple of years ago some of my neighbors bought towers to get line of sight to the providers.

My first provider in 2009- PrairieNet - gave 1mbs speed and was frequently down.  Next, my electric co-op made a subsidiary ISP "OneSource" that gave me 10mbs down and 2 up - it was a tremendous improvement.  However, their ISP bleed cash until it called it quits and I ended up on Rise Broadband (in about 2018?).  Some people had problems with Rise, but I never did, and my final speed test I ran on the system clocked in at 40mbs down and 10mbs up.  Not shabby and about the speeds I had in 2008 when I lived in Hurst.

Fast forward to 2023, after 14 years Verizon's successor Frontier has finally run fiber to my neighborhood.  As happy as I might have been with Rise over the last few years, it does not and cannot compare to 500mbs service (and even faster available).  I never thought I'd see this day - I actually had to upgrade the wiring I did with Cat5 in my house to Cat6.

There have been a couple of times that it has bogged down to very slow speeds, but it's been mostly good so far. We shall see...