Tag: "allo"

PCMag’s Fastest ISPs in America List Once Again Proves the Value of Cities Investing in Internet Infrastructure

Posted June 30, 2021 by Ry Marcattilio-McCracken

After three years in a row with similar results, PCMag’s “Fastest ISPs in America” for 2021 analysis shows a clear trend: community owned and/or operated broadband infrastructure supports networks which, today, handily beat the huge monopoly Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - cable and telephone alike – for sheer speed.

The latest list proves it. Of the ten-fastest ISPs in the country, all of them feature operators that either are cities themselves or use city-owned fiber or conduit to deliver service across whole or parts of their footprint.

City-run networks making the list again this year include Longmont, Colorado (third); Chattanooga, Tennessee (sixth); and Cedar Falls, Iowa (seventh). Cedar Falls topped the list last year, but all three networks are regulars over the last three analyses done by the outlet. Broken down regionally, they are also joined by other municipal networks around the country, including FairlawnGig in Ohio and LUS Fiber in Louisiana.

But equally telling is that the private ISPs which make up the remainder of the list lean heavily on publicly built and/or operated broadband infrastructure in parts of their service territory. Overall winner Empire Access has used fiber routes from an open access middle mile network via Empire Axcess in New York state. Likewise, second-place Google Fiber and fourth-place Ting lease city-owned fiber to operate in places like Huntsville, Alabama and Westminster, Maryland, respectively. Fifth-place Hotwire uses public fiber in Salisbury, North Carolina. Eighth-place ALLO Communications is a public-private partnership veteran. Ninth-place Monkeybrains uses city-owned dark fiber in San Francisco, California. Finally, tenth-place Sonic...

Cedar Falls Utilities Tops PCMag Fastest ISPs List

Posted June 23, 2020 by Ry Marcattilio-McCracken

This is the tenth year that PCMag has conducted its Fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) test, and it comes at a time when tens of millions more Americans across the country are working from home. This time, the results show two significant categories of winners — municipal networks and private-sector ISPs using publicly owned fiber or conduit — which says a lot about the state of high-speed Internet. Like last year, municipal networks and their private-sector partners, along with locally-owned providers, dominated the rankings.

PCMag’s methodology doesn’t seem to have changed much in 2020. Using a customized tool, the outlet tests ping, jitter, and per-second data throughput on the download and upload side of things. The results are weighted 80% towards download and 20% towards upload. From June 1st to June 2nd, 443,940 tests were completed, with the magazine ruling out non-U.S. benchmarks for a final aggregation of 358,358 tests. The minimum threshold to earn a place on the list is 100 tests, and PCMag breaks down the results in two major categories: Fastest Major ISP (those with at least a million subscribers) and Fastest Overall ISP. Read the full report here.

PC Mag Fastest ISPs

Cedar Falls Utilities Dominates

The biggest news is that municipal network Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) took the top spot as Fastest ISP in America by a wide margin. Founded in 1994, CFU connected its first broadband customer in 1996 and completed its Fiber-to-the-Home upgrade for all subscribers in 2013. That year, the city of 41,000 became Iowa’s first Gigabit City. Today, the utility serves around 15,000 homes and businesses. CFU has also been in the news recently after announcing a 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) symmetrical tier for $105/month for city residents and $110 for those living in rural areas of its service footprint. They have also been doing their part to close the homework gap by offering 15 Mbps Internet...

Dark Fiber Brings the Light: A Public-Private Partnership in Colorado

Posted June 11, 2020 by Ry Marcattilio-McCracken

After years of hearing from its citizens and business owners that Internet access was one of Fort Morgan’s most pressing problems, the Colorado city of 11,000 decided to do something about it. Like dozens of other communities around the state, in 2009 residents approved a ballot measure to opt out of SB 152, the 2005 state law preventing municipalities from offering broadband. (Today, more than 100 local goverments have opted out.)

Ten years later, a little forethought, hard work, and a public-private partnership with ALLO Communications has brought gigabit speeds and low prices to everyone in Fort Morgan over the city's dark fiber network.

Taking the First Steps

Between 2013 and 2015 Fort Morgan conducted a feasibility study while assessing its needs in the early stages of a plan to expand the city's existing fiber network connecting anchor institutions — itself the result of the state’s 2002 Beanpole Telecommunications Project [pdf] — to residents and businesses. The city reiterated the necessity of an affordable, reliable network in the 2016 Connect Fort Morgan [pdf] plan update. In May Fort Morgan awarded the initial design project to Manweiler Telecom Consulting, Inc., the firm that had built the city’s original fiber network a decade and a half before. The city paid $160,000 for the initial phase of the system’s design.

Connect Fort Morgan

On May 4, 2017, the city issued a Request for Information (RFI) which identified either a public-private partnership or a franchise model for the forthcoming operation and management of the network. As part of the RFI, the city indicated its desire to integrate into the upcoming network the city’s...

First Breckenridge Residents Connect to Community's Fiber9600 Network

Posted December 16, 2019 by Lisa Gonzalez

Summit County Commissioner Elisabeth Lawrence and her husband who live in Breckenridge, Colorado, received a special holiday treat on December 9th — their house was connected to the new community network, Fiber9600. Crews braved the snow in the mountain community in order to complete the first home install.

Winter Waits for No Fiber

Two residential neighborhoods have been chosen for the first installs. ALLO Communications, the Internet access provider delivering service via the publicly owned fiber optic infrastructure, has stopped scheduling new installation appointments due to the inhospitable winter construction season.

According to ALLO senior operations manager Junius Businelle, however, crews will continue to complete scheduled installations in the first two designated neighborhoods with expected completion by February 1. Installation is free and takes about 90 minutes to two hours, unless a subscriber asks for TV installation, which requires up to an hour.

Lawrence and her spouse, Ryan Scholl, wanted to switch to ALLO because their previous Internet access was too expensive and unreliable. “We’re really looking forward to it because we have really inconsistent internet,” she told Summit Daily.

From Open to ALLO

The city’s early plans were to develop an open access network in order to spur competition. The community, which welcomes large numbers of tourists every year, has experienced poor Internet access and high rates. City leaders, however, considered the challenges for ISPs operating on open access networks, such as getting a foothold in the community, and decided instead to work solely with ALLO for the first ten years.

With the option to renew the arrangement with ALLO for two more 10-year terms, Breckenridge will give the company a chance to establish themselves as a new entrant. The community will preserve an option to find another ISP in the future, if they’re not satisfied with ALLO after a reasonable period.

As Commissioner Lawrence noted, subscribers will be able to sign up for better service than has...

Munis Make PCMag Fastest ISPs List Again

Posted July 3, 2019 by Lisa Gonzalez

Since 2011, PCMag has collected speed data and written about the country’s Fastest ISPs based on download and upload results. This year’s results reflect, once again, that locations with publicly owned broadband infrastructure contribute to communities’ ability to offer faster connectivity.

How They Did It

PCMag asked readers to use a special speed test developed specifically for this reporting that measured download and upload speeds. PCMag's Speed Index assigned to each ISP represented 80 percent download speed and 20 percent upload speed. Filtering out non-U.S. tests, they ended up with 256,016 tests that applied to the comparisons. If, however, a location (for state and regional comparisons) or ISP had fewer than 100 tests, the folks at PCMag did not consider it a contender.

While editors further broke down results so as to stack major ISPs against each other in a head-to-head comparison, they also looked at all the results in a general comparison. PCMag broke down the results further by region and city. For more details on the results, check out the full article.

Munis New and Not-So-New

FairlawnGig in Ohio made the list this year, adding a third municipal Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to the list. The city’s retail service began serving residents with gigabit connectivity back in 2017, after firmly establishing their fiber services for local businesses.

When contemplating the investment, city leaders adopted the approach that their fiber optic network would be an essential piece of infrastructure on par with sewers or roads. Fairlawn used municipal bonds with no intention of turning a profit; they considered the network an investment that would keep the Akron suburb competitive. Residents, businesses, and institutions in Fairlawn, however, have enthusastically signed up for fast, reliable, connectivity where residents can get gigabit Internet access for $75 per month.

Fairlawn’s municipal FTTH network will keep company with a veteran to the list — Longmont, Colorado’s...

Breckenridge Revises Open Access Network Plans, Chooses ALLO as Exclusive Provider

Posted June 6, 2019 by Katie Kienbaum

Up in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado ski town of Breckenridge has decided to set aside plans to operate its new fiber network as open access, opting instead for a single Internet service provider (ISP).

In May, Breckenridge selected ALLO Communications, a Nebraska-based telecommunications company, as the sole ISP for the town’s planned fiber network, Fiber9600. Town officials had initially planned to run Fiber9600 — named for Breckenridge’s elevation of 9,600 feet above sea level — as an open access network with multiple providers offering services to residents and businesses. However, after interviewing several prospective companies, officials decided to have ALLO be the fiber network’s only provider, at least at first.

Hello ALLO, Goodbye Open Access

Other companies in addition to ALLO responded to a Request for Interest Breckenridge released last fall, but town officials concluded that working with just one provider at the beginning will give Fiber9600 the best likelihood of success and selected ALLO as their preferred partner. Gallagher explained the decision to Summit Daily:

“We realized that if we came out of the box with two of these folks, that neither one of them would probably succeed and we would quite frankly fail delivering service . . . It was more important for us to ensure somebody succeeded with this effort, given the fact that we’re going to spend a lot of money putting in the infrastructure.”

Under the agreement with Breckenridge, ALLO will be Fiber9600’s sole provider and network operator for an initial term of 10 years, which can be extended for up to two additional 10 year terms. If the town ever decides to sell the fiber network, ALLO will also have the right to place the first offer. After ALLO’s lease has ended, Breckenridge could choose to operate the network as open access, but that isn’t guaranteed as part of the agreement.

...

Citywide Fiber Network Nears Completion in Lincoln, Nebraska, Due to Municipal Conduit

Posted March 11, 2019 by Katie Kienbaum

Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, will soon boast another fan favorite — a citywide fiber network that will make gigabit speeds available to all residents and businesses.

The City of Lincoln and ALLO Communications, a Nebraska-based Internet service provider (ISP), are approaching the end of the deployment phase of their partnership aimed at building fiber out to every home and business in the city of about 285,000. To expand the fiber network, ALLO has leased access to Lincoln’s extensive conduit system, which hastened the buildout and lowered costs. With only minor construction remaining, all of Lincoln will soon have access to fast, affordable, reliable gigabit connectivity.

In November, ALLO’s President Brad Moline announced that the company would be “substantially done with boring and conduit placement” by the end of 2018. After that step, which is considered the most intrusive of the construction process, ALLO stated that they still needed to connect approximately 3,000 - 4,000 homes to fiber.

City Owned Conduit Leads the Way

Lincoln began its conduit project in earnest in 2012, taking advantage of downtown redevelopment to deploy conduit along public Rights-of-Way. As of 2016, the city had spent approximately $1.2 million building and maintaining the 300-mile-long conduit network.

To bring better connectivity to Lincoln residents and businesses, the city leases access to the conduit system to private ISPs to deploy fiber networks. In return for access to the conduit, private companies pay fees and abide by the city’s Broadband Franchise ordinance, which stipulates that providers follow...

PCMag's Fastest and the Local Links That Made Them

Posted June 25, 2018 by Lisa Gonzalez

On June 18th, PCMag came out with its list of “The Fastest ISPs of 2018.” The analysis looks at ISP performance in several different ways and provides a range of different side-by-side comparisons. The results prove that publicly owned infrastructure has in important role in bringing high-quality Internet access to Americans.

The Dakotas' Co-ops Rock

When taking a wide angle lens view of the fastest U.S. states results, we noticed that two of the top four states with the fastest ISPs were North Dakota and South Dakota. Rural cooperatives in these two states have excelled at deploying high-quality Internet access via fiber optic infrastructure. As a result, North Dakota and South Dakota have some of the most complete coverage of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Internet access and gigabit FTTH in the country. Notice all the coverage on our cooperative map:

Check out a larger map here.

Like rural electrification in the 1930s, cooperatives are taking on the task of bringing high-speed Internet service to members in rural areas. They live and work in the areas they serve. Big ISPs don’t consider sparsely populated areas suitable investment opportunities, so electric and telephone co-ops are repeating the approach of the 1930s, but this time with fiber networks. Dickey Rural Telephone Cooperative in North Dakota and Venture Communications Cooperative in South Dakota are only a few that have worked to get their members connected.

To learn more about how rural cooperatives have helped rural communities, including North Dakota and South Dakota, check out our policy brief, Cooperatives Fiberize Rural America: A Trusted Model for the Internet Era. We also had an interesting conversation during...

Catching up with Lincoln on Fiber, 5G, and US IGNITE - Community Broadband Bits Podcast 285

Posted December 19, 2017 by Christopher Mitchell

David Young is a veteran of our Community Broadband Bits podcast, having been interviewed in episodes 182, 228, and 238. For reasons that are beyond this interviewer, he still has a job in Lincoln as the Fiber Infrastructure and Right of Way Manager. Just kidding David - you are such a friendly person I cannot help but say mean things about you due to my own character flaws. Don't worry folks, I'm just a little bit anxious to get out of 2017 alive. And does anyone actually read these podcast descriptions anyway?

Where were we? Ah yes - David consented to another interrogation while we were both in Atlanta for the Broadband Communities Economic Development conference. He updates us on the progress around the Fiber-to-the-Home network that Allo is building using conduit leased from Lincoln.

We also talk about Lincoln's progress in working with wireless carriers to deploy 5G and the role David played in helping the Nebraska Legislature develop appropriate deployment policies for the entire state. We wrap up talking about US IGNITE.

Ending 2017 with David Young is a privilege so you might want to ignore next week when our Community Broadband Networks staff discusses our past predictions for 2017 and what we are thinking about heading into 2018.

This show is 17 minutes long and can be played on this page or via iTunes or the tool of your choice using this feed.

Read the transcript of this show here.

You can download this mp3 file directly from here. Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index.

Thanks to Arne Huseby for...

City of Lincoln Conduit Spurs FTTH, School Network Innovation - Community Broadband Bits Podcast 228

Posted November 15, 2016 by Christopher Mitchell

When we last spoke to people from Lincoln, Nebraska, about their innovative conduit program to improve Internet access, we focused on how they had done it - Conduits Lead to Competition, podcast 182. For this week and episode 228 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, we focus more on the community benefits their approach has led to.

We are once again joined by David Young, Fiber Infrastructure and Right of Way Manager in the Public Works Department. We offer a shorter background about the history of the project before focusing on the franchise they developed with local ISP Allo. Allo is building citywide Fiber-to-the-Home and has agreed to provision 15 VLANs at every endpoint. We talk about what that means and implications for schools specifically.

We also touch on permitting issues for local governments and David explains his philosophy on how to speak to the community about potential projects in an engaging manner.

Read the transcript of the show here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

This show is 30 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.