Cutting Ties

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If you are old like me, you remember the days of dial up Internet. The long waits for just about anything Internet related as well as all the headaches that came along with it. Looking back now, it was kind of a cool time, but also pretty amazing that we were able to function on such slow speeds. Like I said, if you are old like me, you will likely remember how big of a deal it was when 56K modems came out. That's right, "K" as in Kilobytes. Where Gigabit Internet is the defacto standard these days, that might be hard for some of you to wrap your heads around.

I'm also reminded of how big of a deal it was when cable Internet came on the scene. I grew up out in the country, so despite the fact that my dad was always into technology and we had a dedicated phone line, the idea of high speed Internet was reserved for the city folks. For a while, I was working for a company that was contracted out by the cable company Charter (now Spectrum) to install cable modems in people's homes. The cable guy would go to a residence and run the lines, then I would come in with the modem and get it set up on their computers.

This was well before wireless, so it was usually just a simple device. Though, computers didn't automatically come with network cards back then, so we had to install one and then get them connected. That usually came with its own array of problems.

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I remember one of the main reasons I moved out of my parents house was so I could live in town where I could get high speed Internet. I also remember via my connections with the cable company being absolutely frustrated that people across the street from my parents could get cable Internet service, but they could not. They have it now, but it was probably a year or two later than they should have gotten it.

Spectrum is one of those companies that people love to hate. Given the way the Internet has been categorized over the years, the cable companies and phone companies were basically able to hold a monopoly on the service. Even after some of that got broken up by the FCC, there still was basically only one choice in our given area when it came to fast reliable Internet service. As much as you wanted to tell Spectrum to take a hike, you had no other option than to shell out money to them each month. Hopefully, that has now changed.

A while ago, I saw an advertisement for a company called OmniFiber. I went online to see if they were in my area, only to find out they did not service my part of the world. I put in my address and asked that I be contacted if they ever expanded out into our neighborhood. Then I kind of forgot about it.

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Fast forward about six months and OmniFiber came back on my radar again. I went to check to see if they had expanded to our area yet only to find they still didn't offer service. I once again put my address in, and asked that I be contacted if they ever did expand my way. Believe it or not, it wasn't two weeks later that I saw OmniFiber trucks doing directional boring just outside of our neighborhood. I was a bit worried they were going to skip over our small dead end street, but a couple weeks later, I was pleasantly surprised to find them laying fiber down our road.

Finally, this past weekend, the sales person came to our door, and within a few minutes, we were signed up for OmniFiber fiber to our home. It's going to be about $30 cheaper per month than what we were paying for Spectrum, and we get a 1GB dedicated asynchronous connection. In just a couple weeks the installers will be coming to get the fiber into our home. I'm honestly kind of nervous. Being such a new company to our area, I am sure there will be a few hookups, but my research on reviews seems to be hit or miss. At the very least, we will still have the wiring in our house for cable Internet, so if we have to switch back, we might even get a better price.

It used to be you could contact Spectrum once a year and haggle with them to lower your rate, but they stopped doing that a long time ago. Like the cellular companies, they reserve all their deals now for new customers, and the people who have been keeping them afloat for decades get shafted.

I'm really excited to take a step forward with this new service, and I really hope it ends up being everything I hoped it would be!

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