Big Construction!

After several years of back and forth, trying to come up with a cost effective solution, Net253 and KPUD have finally come up with a plan to make us “Backhoe / Chainsaw Redundant” for our connection from their county wide fiber network to our core routers.

Here is a sketch of our plans. This project is over $50,000. That is right, we are spending $50K with the sole intention of never having to use it. I am going to continue to drive the 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan (The Hot Rush, it is not for sale, you can’t have it, sorry). This project is purely to add resiliency, reliability, uptime to our network. We don’t want some accident/act of nature to take your service offline for 12 or more hours while emergency crews scramble to replace/repair broken county mainline fiber. As an example of my nightmare, see my Cinco de Mayo post from May 5th. We were not impacted by that incident other than receiving 6 calls from the other ISP’s customers wanting to switch to us immediately. I talked all but one into staying with the other ISP as the event truly wasn’t their fault.

We are dedicated to serving only Kitsap. This project is the one big one that has woken me at night for years. When you look at our rates, we are not the cheapest. As in all things in life, you get what you pay for. What is reliable internet that works so often you are flustered if there is a problem because you don’t remember the last time it didn’t? What is it worth when you call and ask for service and you get a personal call back within minutes to hours, even on a weekend/night? What is it worth to not have to call a call center where someone just reads a script to you and you never get resolution? That is what we are about.

We are not promising perfection, but our goal is as close as we can get given the technical constraints of the KPUD open access fiber optic network.

In the picture below, Yellow is our current goal trail that we have used since 2017. This is on the original backbone that KPUD built out almost 20 years ago. It has been very reliable, no breaks. But we cross SR305 twice and I don’t trust WSDOT to not mess with the right of ways. The Blue is our new “Southern Route” to KPUDs southern node on Bainbridge. Green is our new “North Route” which will be on all new plant less than 5 years old. The short path from Ericksen to Madison is our only exposure. It is 8-12 feet underground most of the way other than service vaults. I can live with that. If anyone wants to kick in another $65K-$85K to eliminate that I will be happy to address it as well.

KPUD now has redundant routes between their nodes on Bainbridge and redundant routes off Bainbridge. One if by land Agate Pass bridge, two if by sea underwater to Bremerton.