We’ll admit it, we haven’t done a great job in the past communicating to our Lummi Island customers what we have accomplished and what we have planned for the future — but that’s about to change! We’ve sent postcards and newsletter email blasts announcing our upgrades, and now we’re blogging about it. We want to use this as a way to communicate important happenings, as well as a way for our customers to get to know a little more about us — our opinions / beliefs about the internet, VoIP, networking, and technology in general.

What We’ve Been Up To

Since taking over the Lummi Island cable system from Mt. Baker Cable last year, we have been busy with upgrades. Once we have completed these improvements, we will offer exciting, new service plans. Here are some of the major improvements we have completed:

1. Stabilized the existing internet feed to the island
2. Purchased and installed a new generator at the headend
3. Ran miles of new fiber on the island in preparation for our upgrade

What We’ve Got Planned (30-60 Days)

1. Installing a new primary internet feed to the island with higher capacity. Along with this, we’ll transition the current feed to become our back up connection. Our new primary internet feed will be located off-island to have more diversity from power outages. This new location is also backed up by batteries and generators.
2. Upgrading our CMTS (the brains of any coax based network) to handle more capacity. Currently we offer 100 meg plans and plan on offering 250 meg plans…very soon.
3. We intend to utilize our newly placed fiber to install additional nodes on the island. A node is defined as a service group that allows customers to access the internet. Each node point is a shared gateway to the internet. Most cable operators have up to 500 customers on the same node — currently we have ~75 customers per node. We intend to install four additional nodes on the cable system to bring the customer count per node down to roughly 40 customers. This will allow us to offer more bandwidth to customers and increase the reliability of each service group.
4. Add home telephone as a service. We’ll announce our service offerings soon.

Questions about what we’ve done or what we have planned? Feel free to contact us.