smccloud Same thing I’m pondering here. Different providers, but same question. You’d think with all these companies growing their last mile footprint that somebody would get to both of us soon.
I talked to the guys who were doing the fiber lashing for Windstream here, and they confirmed it’s part of their FTTH expansion. They pulled fiber from the main road a mile or so from my neighborhood and extended fiber with slack loops to every side street off that road that has above-ground utilities so far, all the way to the utility pole where everything goes underground for my neighborhood, including the existing copper trunk lines. No underground work has been done, but it’s very likely that they’ll use a different contractor for boring. Hopefully that work will happen this spring.
altafiber announced nearly 15 months ago that they were coming here and construction was supposed to begin in 2025. I haven’t seen any activity yet. So I guess they have another day and a half to start. 😂
Lumos was also possibly going to be coming here. (They were more ambiguous about what specific areas were going to be serviced.) But since T-Mobile acquired them it’s unclear how much of that planned expansion is going to happen since their website shows far fewer “coming soon” cities than Lumos’ did. There’s also MetroNet nearby (also since acquired by T-Mobile), but they were never officially planning to make it to my town.
And then Omni Fiber also looks like they plan to expand here, but they have been slow to make progress in the areas that were already underway, and they haven’t started construction here yet. I’ve seen them drop cities from their “planned” list in the past, so I won’t count on them until they’ve actually started OSP work.
We’re also moving next year to a city that has municipal fiber service. I talked to the city to confirm serviceability. There’s already conduit in the ground in front of the property and they expect to have the address serviced in the second half of 2026. That address was/is also supposed to get altafiber and Lumos, but who knows… Windstream has a reserved right-of-way on the road where that property is, but there is no Windstream conduit in the ground there. And of course Spectrum is there, but no high-split yet.
My expectation is that Spectrum high-split will happen first, probably sometime next year for us. It’ll be better than nothing since I’ll finally be able to get more than 40 Mbps upload, which is the biggest pain point for me right now. Their latency is so bad in this market that just about anybody else would be better, though. I’d also like a PON service option because I need better resiliency during power outages. Our node’s backup batteries last about 6 hours, and I suspect they may have bypassed them entirely when there was an issue with our node last year.
