My advice for Gig service is dated. Since the Covid shutdowns, people are spending multiple days per week (or full time) working out of their home. The KPUD residential internet service was not originally engineered by KPUD for “commercial/enterprise” use.

Nowadays, my advice is simplified.

If you spend your entire day working from home using tele-presence (zoom/teams/etc), sign up for the gig service. This way you will never have a problem due to other users in the home.

If you never ever want to have a slowdown/buffering due to your internet link (we cannot control the service you are using, like Netflix/Disney/Hulu/etc) sign up for gig.

If/when you return to in person commuting or retire, drop it down to 100mb. If you work from home, and don’t need real time video/voice, 100mb is fine if there are less than 3 in the home.

Don’t have the KPUD fiber at my house, how much does this cost to get?

Short answer: It depends on a case by case basis, probably a lot. Thousands of dollars minimum. Tens to hundreds of thousands at a high end.

Getting onto the Kitsap PUD is a 4 step process:

Step 1 -  Homeowners or businesses work with KPUD to construct the fiber to their address.

Step 2 – KPUD installs the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) which converts the Fiber to a standard RJ45 (network) port. This is the “Gray Box” that mounts on the exterior of your home. KPUD will schedule a date when they will come inside and add a “wall wart” or power supply inside to power their electronics. If your home is already setup for fiber service you can skip this step and on your order form tell the ISP that the house is already wired.

Step 3 – Choose an ISP and get service ordered. You can browse providers on the KPUD COS system. via the KPUD COS system. It is easier and faster to order the service directly from the providers website. Ours is at Net253 Service.

Step 4 – Your ISP runs a cable, terminates an existing cable, or maybe doesn’t have to do anything from the CPE network port to the customers gateway/router/access point device. If the home is already wired, we do not charge an installation fee. The COS system does not have a way to distinguish between new construction and existing homes, that is why we list our $100 fee to avoid surprise charges.

Step 5 - Your ISP or you configure your router/wireless system and you are online!

KPUD offers an open network with multiple internet service providers competing to win your business.  Hopefully, you choose Net253!

The CPE is an expensive piece of electronics, if you tamper with it, KPUD will assess both a replacement fee and a service fee for doing the replacement. Do not attempt to open the CPE to access the fibers. The only thing behind the CPE is the small storage spool that holds your exposed, delicate, fiber, and some splicing components.

Getting fiber pulled to your location is in most cases a very expensive proposition. It is best handled by getting a group of adjoining properties to band together to finance the construction costs.  KPUD will work with your community to determine the best cost solution. In addition to the fee for simply pulling the fiber, there is often additional equipment, mounted on a pedestal, which supports converting a large area (many square miles) into a super high speed link that goes on the KPUD fiber optic backbone.  These “nodes” are present in all network operator systems. (Centurylink/Comcast/Wave)

Construction note:

When selecting a location for your CPE on the outside of your home there are 3 things to consider:

1)      How will KPUD route the underground or aerial fiber from the street to the box location

2)      How will KPUD get power to the gray box

3)      How will the ISP connect from the box to your home networking gateway/router/access point.

We suggest you pick a location that takes all 3 into account.  Often times, the existing telecommunications CPE boxes are the most practical spot to locate the KPUD box. The FCC requires all telecommunications demarcation to be within 18 inches of one another.

KPUD has to install a power converter, which plugs into a wall outlet inside your home, and then runs low voltage wire (they use network cable) to the CPE. You really want this device located inside the living space, in an accessible location. Checking on the wall wart is one of the primary troubleshooting steps. Imagine if you allow KPUD to mount this in a crawlspace, or on the exterior of the home, and you have to troubleshoot in April in the middle of the night during a torrential downpour.

Your ISP has to run a cable from the CPE to your networking gear inside your home.  Please keep this in mind! Your ISP may have to resort to running the wire on the outside of your building if you choose a spot that is all concrete or inaccessible from the interior of the building.

Getting KPUD low voltage power to the gray box is the least “delicate” piece of the equation. If something has to suffer, Net253 suggests you put the complexity of the power feed as the lowest priority.

Net253 supports you having freedom and control of your telephone solution.  

Net253 Internet supports internet telephony.  This is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) 

You can use your internet connection to make and receive calls from your traditional analog phone sets and keep you existing phone number too.

Net253 has worked with KPUD to ensure your voice traffic will flow over our networks without stutters or garbling that used to be associated with VOIP telephony.

After about one year of research, implementation, testing, we now offer a residential land line replacement service. We install a Grandstream phone line adapter which interconnects to a private branch exchange (PBX) at our headnode. This is the same style of system any Telco uses, just pure VOIP instead of the legacy analog signaling for dialing and local loop. Our service includes un-metered US and Canada calling. If you have an alarm system, or other “special” devices that require Grounded Loop Start compatibility, we may not be a viable solution. It depends on your equipment; older equipment expects an exact analog phone line to inter-operate. We are able to provide dedicated “Alarm” lines that transport “Contact ID” signaling. These special lines are configured to speak Alarmesse; they do not work well as a phone line for voice.

Our solution is e911 registered, and intended for stationary application. If you are looking for a cheap way to have a portable phone number, this is not the service for you.

Keep Your Land Line ?

You need to factor in the work you will have to personally do (and maintain) to save the money and have reliability similiar to your Centurylink line.

If you have poor cell phone reception (without the use of a “booster” or WiFi calling), please consider keeping the land line. At our home, we have dropped our DSL line in 2021 and only have our Net253 fiber service.

911 Calls

·       E-911 – When you dial 911 on an internet phone, it is an interesting puzzle. Because your mobile device can be anywhere in the world, where should 911 route the call to?

·       The solution is enhanced 911. This service allows us to register your address so that when you dial 911, it routes to your local emergency response center and populates their incident form with your address.  Please, for the love of your family, make sure we have your physical address information on record. It does no responder (fire/EMT/police) any good to have Jane Doe PO Box 124 Seabeck WA as the address.

Backup Power Supply

·      One of the differences between a digital phone and a landline is the requirement of local electricity. Analog landline phones from Century Link are supposed to work when the power is out as the phone company has the generator to provide backup power. In order to preserve that phone availability we suggest that you invest in some power back-up gear.

·       If you plan to use internet phone, you should invest in a small uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to power the equipment that operates your phone solution.

Depending on how your network is setup, you may need to power 3 or 4 items

1)      Power injector that powers the KPUD CPE box on the outside of your home. (The white plug in with the blue light)

2)      Your gateway/router/wireless access point device.

3)      Your VOIP gateway device that provides your local analog tones.

4)

Once you have this all setup and UPS back ups in place, you can test it by turning off the main breaker for your home, and trying to place a call. If it doesn’t work, you missed something.

Please test this before you have a power outage. If you think about it, when are you most likely to have an accident? Yup, that’s right, when the power is out and you are doing unusual things in your routine.  Take the time to be prepared.  This is the main expense of using a VOIP phone line over the traditional phone line.

You can plug your cordless phone base or traditional phone directly into the phone adapter. During our install, we may be able to reconfigure your home phone wiring to enable multiple jacks in your home. In this case, we must make sure the legacy phone line connections to the local exchange carrier (LEC) are disconnected. It is poor form to cross connect our service to Centurylink, neither side of that equation will be happy.

You can port your existing telephone number from any carrier (Cell phone or Landline) into Net253.  In addition, down the road, you can port it away. As long as you are paying a bill for your phone number, it is yours to move wherever you want. Please note, you absolutely cannot cancel your old phone service until your number is ported.  If you cancel your service before your number ports, then it is “Released” and it is not a sure bet you will get it back.

Your house is wired for cable television and telephone, but no Ethernet cables? What to do?

Wireless mesh technology is good enough now. After 10 years and over 1,000 customers nobody has elected to use MOCA technology described below. The wifi mesh solutions have been deployed hundreds of times - it is our standard install.

• Are you mostly just using devices to access to consume data from the internet?

• Is the only “inside the home” networking printing to a shared printer wireless, or are you using a printer with cloud print capability?

 If so, then you can use a wireless network in  your home. You will need to determine where to locate your wireless access point (router). Look into a mesh solution if you want solid coverage everywhere or have a large home or lots of walls/floors.

Do you have a home network storage device?  You may want a hardwired connection between your router and any “stationary” device that consumes and produces data.

So you have determined you really want a few connections to be hardwired, but your staring at the barrel of a coax port and know that it isn’t going to work.

·      Well, it can.  A while back folks developed the Multi-media Over Coax Alliance, (MOCA), which is a way put Ethernet on top of the coax cables.

·      The adapters are a little pricey (around $60), but compared to the fee of an electrician pulling new wires? Or stapling wires to the outside of your home to get to the second floor? Pretty attractive

·      The adapters use a wall adapter to power themselves.

·      You can form a small network on your in house coax with up to 16 adapters. Count on 8 working just fine in most cases.

MOCA product sources

https://www.amazon.com/TRENDnet-Mid-Band-Transmission-Distances-TPA-311/dp/B00684E0UI

https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Adapter-Ethernet-Bonded-MM1000/dp/B077Y3SQXR

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833301067

How to get Local TV over Internet?

With Net253’s Fiber Optic Internet service, you can use any video streaming source that supports “Over The Top” style delivery. That’s a long winded way of saying any video source available on the internet. Some examples are Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Twitch. These services are all on demand, you pick what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and it starts playing. That leaves the local channels, how to get them?

There are four olutions available today. Note, no ISP on the KPUD network offers a “video package” anymore, that is obsolete technology.

• YouTube TV subscription (This is youtube TV, not youtube premium)

• DirectTV Direct TV (satellite) has a subscription plan

• FuboTV subscription

• Hulu+ Hulu TV service with Live TV
  

Disney+ is a bundle which can include Hulu as well. Many of these subscriptions offer a way to pay an extra $6 a month to eliminate ads from the on demand service. You cannot eliminate ads from Live TV, it’s live after all. You can DVR live recordings and then fast forward through the ads with your remote.

All of these services allow you to stream up to 3 screens at the same time with the base subscription. Note, you need either a Smart TV or a streaming device per television.

These solutions require either a “Smart TV” or an external streaming device.

What is a smart TV and what does it do? A smart TV, sometimes referred to as connected TV or hybrid TV, is a television set with integrated Internet features. Smart TV is a technological convergence between computers and flatscreen television sets and set-top boxes.

What is an external streaming device? You can think of the external streaming device as an equivalent to a Cable Set Top Box.The streaming device decodes your selected program and displays it on the television, just like a cable box.

There are several streaming devices on the market that can hook up to your TV to enable streaming video programming. You need to have a TV that has an HDMI port on your TV. Roku, Amazon TV Fire Stick,  Apple TV, and Vidia Shield TV are a few that are available. Avoid the Roku Express or other discount versions, their perfomance is stunted to save on cost.

Link to PC Mag side by side comparison of several external streaming device solutions.

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421457,00.asp

In a nutshell, more reliable than your power company or any cable based provider.  At our datacenter location we have equipment capable of providing internet to every home and business in Kitsap County.  We have a generator and fuel storage solution that can run for weeks, UPS (uninterruptible power supply) technology, electrical switchgear and power wiring, secure (concrete walls) data vault, redundant air conditioned space to house the servers that transport your data and phone traffic via the KPUD fiber optic network.  

All networking gear we use is cold spare redundant; we have copies of all parts we use in the data center, pre-configured and ready to be deployed in the unlikely event of a catastrophic hardware failure. This is a minimal downtime, from 5 minutes to 15 minutes depending on tech availability, and has been used once in the 10 years we have been doing this service.

Net253 is only as reliable as KPUDs fiber optic network.  KPUDs network is very reliable, and faults (tree falling,  storm damages) are cleared very quickly. Your data is on the same network fibers as Kitsap county fire departments, police stations, schools, and governmental offices.  That’s pretty good company.

Windows 10 uses a new model for update distribution which by default uses your computer to update computers in your neighborhood.  This benefits Microsoft at the expense of your ISP. In addition, Microsoft assumes it is fine to reboot your computer if you haven't touched it for a while.  Ever woken up in the morning and lost that information you were working on? Ever tried to catch a ferry but your laptop is sitting at "Do not turn off your computer" screen, for 20 minutes?

Please read the following article to make some informed choices on your Windows 10 experience.

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/features/windows-10-7-default-settings-you-should-change-immediately-after-install-744550

At a minimum, please perform the following two items, you will be happier with these settings.

Stop Automatic Restarts - Instead, conf• What about my old email address?gure windows to "Notify to schedule restart"

Optimize updates for your computers - Deliver Updates only to PC's on your local network.

As a resale telecommunications provider, Net253, LLC is similar to a telephone company, cable company, or other utilities. You do not issue 1099 reports to these categories of companies, nor is it required for Corporations. Net253, LLC is registered with the IRS and tax classified as an S-Corporation. If you really want a W9, we will be happy to share it with you.

Per the IRS W-9 instruction sheet:

Every year KPUD has to repair damaged overhead fiber due to gunshot damage. The worst case damage is caused by shotgun or pellet gun. The small pellets impact the fiber bundle and damage the inner fibers without severing the fiber casing. This makes finding the damage extremely difficult. Often times the best clue is the discarded shotgun casing on the ground nearby.

Please recognize that shooting at birds or animals on utility lines can cause service disruption for yourself and your community, even if there is no visible evidence of damage. Fiber is extremely strong in tension. Pulling on fiber like a tug of war requires great force to break. However, fiber is very fragile in shear. The impact shot imparts a shearing force which can cause partial or complete blockage of light transmission, while only deforming the plastic casings protecting the fiber.

Update in 2023. It appears folks have got the message, we haven’ had a fiber break due to firearms in over two years! Way to go Kitsap!

The wall wart that powers your internet is often times plugged into an outlet circuit that is in the garage, and that circuit is protected by a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) device. These pesky little things are a nuisance, but unfortunately, it is NEC law that they be installed in any damp location, and garages are deemed damp.

When your power goes out, and comes back on, often times the GFCI trips.

If you have power back on, and your internet doesn’t restore within 5 minutes, check that your wall wart is glowing the blue light of happiness. If not, look in your breaker panel for a partially tripped circuit breaker. Flip it fully off, and then back on. If there are no breakers tripped, then you have to hunt for the in-wall GFCI, which has a test/reset button. Most have an indicator to show they are tripped.

The KPUD fiber system is built with technology called “Active Ethernet”. On the side of your home there is a gray box installed which converts the LASER light that travels to/from your home into a standard network cable port that connects to your home network router. That box requires power to operate. Since a Fiber Optic network has no metallic conductors, there is no way for KPUD to provide the power to operate the box. As a result, there is a small white “Wall Wart” that is installed inside the home, normally very close to where the box is on the outside of the home. This power supply converts the 120VAC nominal voltage in your home to around 12VDC to power the gray box. When the “Wall Wart” is operating correctly, it has a nice “Blue Light” that indicates it is working fine. You can press the blue light for a moment and the light will fade away, this causes a power cycle to the external gray box.

This will help you get back online very quickly.

Some people are transitioning to fiber from CenturyLink, Comcast, or Wave Broadband and have used an email address provided by their ISP.

If you are transitioning from Comcast, you are in luck. Comcast will continue to let you use your old comcast.net email address as long as you sign in and fetch/send mail at least once every four months.

CenturyLink and Wave take the hard nose approach. When your service is terminated, your email is gone.

I would never use an email address provided by an ISP; we don’t offer it. Besides the obvious inconvenience of possibly losing access to your email if you change providers, it is further complicated in that the ISP is storing your email. We don’t want to take on that liability.

I use gmail for my personal email. It’s very reliable, free, yes they may tailor ads based on my email. However, I trade that off against having no problems with my personal email for over 20 years. Gmail also has tools and utilities to help you manage transitioning off of another email solution.

Net253 blocks a very small set of networks. We do this as we have determined these networks have systems operating on them that are explicitly scanning subscribers homes looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. We block only 769 out of the total 16,777,216 global /24 network blocks. These blocks aren’t going to put a crimp on your style; we have kept a constant stream of malicious packets out of your home.

The following table is the blocks we drop into the water under Puget sound. If you have a legitimate use for one of these networks, contact us at support@net253.net. The 183.235.0.0 netblock was recently caught port scanning our “honeypot” at Net253 HQ by using reverse NAT cone indirection. This is nation state actor level stuff (i.e. Chinese government).

95.181.0.0/16  - Russia - Russian Federation,  E-Light Telecom Ltd.

61.177.0.0/16  - China - Chinanet Backbone, Jiansgu Province Network

80.94.92.0/24  - Netherlands - PP Technology Limited - Unmanaged Dedicated Servers (sketchy as heck)

183.235.0.0/16 - China - China Mobile Communications - GuangDong Province