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.
With media now consumable on the go, of course the US government started to get involved and this caused a huge increase in regulation. As a result, a good chunk of the media, TV, and movie world fell apart. Most may not be aware, but TV and radio FCC renewals are always processed in a staggered format. Cable companies have a license agreement with networks (like ABC, ESPN, Fox…etc)in order to create a channel line up. As streaming became more prevalent, these distributors like, Spectrum, Cox, and Netflix decided with the new streaming media for delivery, traditional transmission methods were no longer needed.
We all know this.
