Zippity Doo Dah
This summer we have been wrapping up a multi-year upgrade. We entered a three year contract with Level 3, oops Lumen, oops now AT&T (full circle) to make our facility “on net”. This means our building is considered on the Lumen global network. This opens the doors to us for additional technology options such as dark fiber.
We invested to upgrade Lumen’s Central Office (CO) on Bainbridge Island to support 100gb technology. This involved upgrading their metropolitan switch at 1000 Denny (In Seattle), their CO here on Madison Ave Bainbridge, and the optical mux/demux facility that is at both ends of the cross sound fiber (it travels under the ferry route most of the way, but goes a little further into Eagle Harbor, where the City of Bainbridge directed a pile driver company to drive a sea anchor through the fiber a few years ago, directly in front of the huge sign that says “Buried Submarine Cable, NO Anchoring”)
Our link to the Lumen central office on Bainbridge is 100% underground, it travels in ducts set in the 70s back when qWest built local infrastructure to be nuclear attack hardened. Underground 6x20x8 concrete vaults, mostly steel conduits for the fiber to be pulled in. The total underground path to the CO is less than 2000 feet. This path is 100% seperated from our KPUD infrastructure by more than a backhoe reach. The closest point is the entry to our building, which is 12 feet apart.
We now have 10 times the bandwidth available to us than the KPUD backbone supports in most portions of the county. We have more than double the bandwidth available than all the other ISPs on the KPUD network combined. We can confidently state it is technically impossible for Net253 to be the reason you are having a slowdown on your service. It simply isn’t possible short of a DDOS attack on your home. We have mitigations in place for that event as well.
This has been a very long day in coming.
We are now true dual route, organizationally redundant, backhoe/vandal resistant both inside Kitsap (getting to your home), and outside Kitsap (getting to the internet)
No other ISP on the KPUD network has this level of redundancy to ensure any fiber break in the county cannot transpire into a bad day for all of its customers. We are the only ISP with our core router complex (BGP) located in county. It is difficult to reach outside of Kitsap with high capacity bandwidth; dual path is even harder.
This was insanely expensive. It will cost us about $6 per month per home we serve for the next three years for this upgrade. Did we have to do this? No. But we want to provide the best service possible; in our minds that means investment to provide a platform that scales into the future.
As my grandma told me, you get what you pay for in life.