Category: Tech News

Rural Broadband in 2019

As I’m sure many of you know, even in our local area, broadband in 2019 has still been a hairy situation for the Highland Lakes, even 2 years into 5 plus new providers.  Rural broadband continues to be a struggle, not only for consumers to get services, but for small and even medium size providers to be able to impact this.  There’s been a lot of chatter on Facebook groups regarding 4G providers coming into this specific area to offer home internet, lots of talk about 5G going to change the market, but the fact of the matter is, that is just not true.

Bigger providers like the big box wireless and big box data names are purely focused on the metro markets.  Regardless of what you may have heard.  There have been PLENTY of news stories put out how many cable TV providers and wireless providers, even though they have mobile service, focus on metro areas, as that’s where most of the people reside.  So if your one of the hold outs for this, your gonna be on that bus an awful long time waiting for it to arrive.

President Obama tried to do something about it, and failed horribly.  Even President Trump tried, but somehow, took a cheap route out, and instead of actually helping the problem, simply lowered the standard enough, so that that it landed at the speeds of most 4G LTE networks to claim he “got everyone broadband”.  Cheap way out.  And if that wheren’t enough, we have big box data trying to buy up the spectrum that small WISP’s and RISP’s like ours are relying on to continue upgrading our networks.  The simple matter of the situation folks is, there is no internet coming from any big box company, not for many, many, years.  If the Highlands Area has any hope of getting broadband like all the rest of metro America we need to band together and build our own brand new network.

Watch the YouTube video below posted on the channel @Vox which has pretty reliable sources to get you started on your hunt for information on why internet is still spotty in this area in 2019.  Don’t just take my word on it, or the information you get out of the video, but use it as a jump point for you to do your own research.  Read for yourself those Connect America documents and the misinformation that’s in them.  On the surface it leads less informed folks to belive, that as some in some facebook groups claim, is coming.  I like to present people with all the information at hand, at let them decide for themselves.  Our customer base are bright and informed individuals.  Just because we live out in the sticks doesn’t mean we don’t want highspeed broadband internet like the rest of America.

So, I suppose by now, your asking yourself, okay Mr. Hyper Fusion CEO, what do you plan to do about it?  Well, as I’m sure many of you already know, Hyper Fusion exploded way to big, way to fast.  We’ve taken a dedicated approach over the last 2 months to put in lots of extra hours in our field not only going back to upgrade our existing tower infrastructure, but also, do go back and re-tune alot of our original customers and get cracking on ramping up piling thru our new service request backlogs.  As our new customer sign rate has once again surged, the most recent round of updates and their results have no doubt gotten around.  After repairing all the damage from previous unskilled and untrained staff we are about 75% complete with repairing this damaged and those areas that are now back to the insane speeds they where, we aim to make a heavy push on installing as many folks as we can over the winter.  We have gone back thru each and every circuit 1 by 1 for our year end audit to identify week circuits and will be super beefing up everything we already have over the next 4 to 8 weeks thru the winter so that come spring time we can get back to building new repeaters and expanding and offering other folks awesome prices on internet.

The primary problem with internet in this area, with many of the other providers, is every one of those providers in Lampasas is feeding off AT & T’s already over exhausted fiber network out there and are all squabbling over a customer here and a customer there.  Additionally, you have the City of Lampasas trying to deploy their own fiber network and charge EVERY citizen for it, regardless if they have internet, as I’m told, this is their line of thinking.  If I where them, I’d probably think twice.  Texas State Law to the best of my knowledge, specifically says this illegal for a municipality to own or operate, either directly, or in-directly thru a 3rd party provider, wherein the municipality has any influence or control.  So, having another local provider do it for them, as one of them as claimed they are doing, is actually highly against Texas State Law.

We’re not looking to take advantage of folks like this, that’s why our subscription rates are on ave, 30% lower than any other provider in our class.  Our website traffic ranking continues to increase and out traffics all other competitors, including Rise Broadband and Grande Communications.  Don’t believe us?  Visit https://www.alexa.com  ( powered by Amazon folks ) and look for yourself.  Every day more and more posts are going up from the last several weeks and drastic shift in Hyper Fusion as a whole.  We don’t ever want our customers to feel ignored, or passed over.  We are going to make an extreme push over the month of December thru until Christmas to continue to answer every phone call and reply to every ticket.  We are very quickly getting caught up now that we have another full time field engineer who can climb towers!!  Blake continues to amaze us all and has become instrumental in getting Hyper Fusion’s field back together.  Additionally, we have an outstanding new business management and accounting team who has managed to get all our bills, tower rents, and most other affairs all back going the right direction and has us well on our way to becoming a power house in the central Texas rural internet market.

It has taken Will more than 5 months to put the field back together and he’s still not all the way complete yet.  He is a machine and continues to amaze all of us how it is that between Will and Blake there is twice as much work getting done during the 2nd half of the year, as compared to the first half of the year when we had a total of 4 running around thinking they knew what they where doing.  Clear, the proof is in the pudding as they say.  As we bring 2019 to a close, we’re also making a commitment as a company and a staff to put the past behind us and forget about all those folks who have tried to poke at Hyper Fusion as we grew.  We survived.  We remain.  We VOW that we will fight at all costs to make sure Hyper Fusion continues to be around for generations to come and we will never stop fighting for what’s right, and we aim to fulfill  those gaps in rural broadband by bringing OUTSIDE providers, and not just re-selling AT & T, we remain committed to always operating our own wireless and fiber network IN-HOUSE and not having a 3rd party company operate our gear and network for us and claim its ours.  We remain committed to NEVER call AT & T up, to order an install at a customer location, and when they are complete and its working, simply slap our sticker on it and call it ours.    We install our own right of way infrastructure, we run our own cable to customer locations, we PRIVATELY OWN the fiber we lay.   We do all our web programming in-house as well as all of our wireless network administration.  That’s why other WISP’s continue to fail, yes, they may know “how to link a radio” but they know nothing about network design, gear selection, real time network monitoring and administration, proactively reacting to daily changing wireless environments, and protecting networks from internet threats.

FCC gives ISPs another $563 million to build rural-broadband networks

So, surfing the web as I always do, I came across this article on ARS Technica, a technology news website that I frequent, and came across a story published July 16th, 2019 on their website in which they announce that the FCC is giving ISP’s another $563 Million to build rural-broadband networks.   There has been a lot of talk and chatter around Burnet and Lampasas county that this new “federal money is coming”.  I would be doing a dis-service if I didn’t help explain that a little better.  If you read the FCC’s announcement much more closely, you’ll learn that his money is distributed thru the “Connect America Fund” and companies, such as Hyper Fusion and the “other guys” in the area needed to have submitted their application for those funds MONTHS ago, and that distribution had it gone to anyone in our area would have been announced.

Another one of the big requirements to get access to these funds, is that the ISP’s offer plans and prices akin to the bigger city metro areas.  CLEARLY by reviewing prices you can see that EVERY other “WISP” in the area’s prices are FAR over what a normal spectrum cable modem plan would cost you in San Marcos, TX for example.  That’s why at Hyper Fusion, we refer to ourself as a “RISP” or “Rural Internet Service Provider”.  The companies similar to the ones we compete with have had a historical practice of charging MUCH higher prices for wireless internet, when its not even reliable as its hardline comparative.   The sad news is, that even if the Highland Lakes area did have a provider that received those funds, clearly no other provider is going to abide by the pricing caps.  That’s why our prices are much lower and much more inline with metro service prices, and our service operates and bills the same way.  No slow down in speed once you’ve used a particular amount, no data capping, no nothing. Just pure, raw, internet, as it should be.

If you want to read the full story, just click the link below:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/fcc-gives-isps-another-563-million-to-build-rural-broadband-networks/

Another systemic practice this program hopes to eliminate is LOCAL MUNICIPALITIES trying to take over internet and offering monopolized internet services for themselves.  This is something the regulation is trying to prevent.  So what the City of Lampasas is trying to accomplish thru offering internet themselves is EXTREMELY frowned upon and the FCC is working hard to abolish.  Along with local municipalities charging extra franchise fee’s, and other grossly inflated “regulatory fees” for putting infrastructure in.  Which is a big reason Lampasas doesn’t have good internet yet, is because their poor systemic policy making and decision making processes.  Hyper Fusion is working hard to make sure that our practices and policies are inline with the way these processes and practices should be, regardless if its the law, it’s simply the right thing to do.

As reported in this Rueters article ( https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fcc-television/u-s-fcc-votes-to-tighten-rules-on-cable-franchise-fees-idUSL2N24X180 )

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said “every dollar paid in excessive fees is a dollar that by definition cannot and will not be invested in upgrading and expanding networks.”

Cable operators pay roughly $3 billion annually in franchise fees to state and local governments.

New York told the FCC all city fire stations get free cable and internet service from cable providers.

This is ridiculous and clearly the aim of the Lampasas City government.  If you look specifically at local municipalities, like Burnet, Marble Falls, Kingsland, Llano, and others like it, almost NONE of them have had any type of news stories regarding internet, because all those municipalities work with providers to get them in, and get multiple providers in.  Marble Falls and Burnet both have Northland Cable and Spectrum, to much bigger co-ax companies.  Lampasas has NONE.  Think about that folks, and its been that way for years.  I know for a fact, lots of folks have high hopes for internet in Lampasas, but the fact of the matter is, its just not going to happen.  Our primary competitor over there, just re-sells AT & T, and the new start up company, Olive IP, sells 4G LTE SIM’s, which guess what folks, operate off AT & T towers.  So you now have 2 new providers, packing on rural area customers that where never on those already over exhausted Lampasas AT & T fiber lines.  This does nothing but make the problem worse.

Here we are, 2 years into delivering internet in Lampasas County and not a SINGLE provider has brought in any new fibers, lines, or anything, except Hyper Fusion.  Our own genuine staff and managers, dig, hang, trench, and install our PRIVATELY OWNED and operated fibers, and we DO NOT use AT & T or Spectrums fibers at all to accomplish this.  We do not just call up AT & T to come install a fiber to the business connection and then slap our sticker on it and call it our own.  We use our own means to get fiber going because Lampasas and Kempner, and all of central rural Texas really needs NEW and MORE, not over stuffing what’s already there.  Anyone whose not on that boat, and charges twice the price as we do, is nothing clearly short of a rip off, by declaration of the FCC itself.  They are FORCING providers in rural area’s like ours to set their prices more competitively in order to get the money.  Just a clear obvious intention to rip people off if your a small rural provider and your charging that much.

We want to hear all our customers and website visitors thoughts on this.  Check out our Forums discussion topic regarding this article by clicking the link below:

https://forums.hyperfusiontech.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=29