This summer has seen nearly 20 miles of fiber to the home built in Cowiche, and West Valley. We used contract crews to install most of the main line. Installing fiber has three phases: 1) The main line installation, 2) Installing the fiber cases, and 3) Installing the splitters, and extending the drops on the poles. Most of the mainline is installed, although it went far slower than we hoped for during our construction season of May to the end of October. Once again we paid for it from the revenue of our Wireless network, and proudly not through prohibitive government funding. We’re not ruling out government funds in the future, but under their current requirements, it just isn’t very attractive.

The next phase is the completion of the fiber with steps 2 and 3 noted above. You will see our new fiber trailer in your neighborhood soon with our fiber splicers completing the project, and in Cowiche (which is first) we will begin converting existing Wireless, and new customers over within about a month or two. West Valley will be more in November and December. All construction stops when the snow flies.

What won’t stop with the snow is our winter conversion of the cable network over to fiber. Honestly the speeds are more than ample with our cable system for every one of our users, but we are competition driven. What that means is you have a company called Ziply Fiber in your area that took over for Frontier. They have made basically no improvements so you still have DSL, NOT fiber as their name suggests. We’ve heard rumors of them wanting to replace the phone lines with fiber in the Spring. THUS we will be beating them to that project by having the entire town fiber to the home before Spring.

Our cable/fiber division (or as we call it our wired division), is 8 employees strong, dedicated to maintaining and building wired infrastructure. Obviously we haven’t forgotten our core business of Wireless, and plan to improve speeds again in time for the holidays. Not just because of tower improvements we’ve made all Summer, but also as customers move to our Wired network, it takes load off of our Wireless towers making them less overloaded, which was our goal in the first place.

We’re already saving up money for the entire Winter to start Construction again with another 20 miles slated for fiber to the home (mostly in West Valley) to start up in May again.

There’s you update! You’ll know when we have fiber in your area when we put a door hanger at your house!

Thanks for supporting local!

Forbes Mercy

President – Washington Broadband, INC