In sunny weather, Cruzio’s all-pro field team installs fast new connections to our independent network. We also spend a lot of time and investment upgrading the parts of the network nobody sees, making it more robust and redundant.

We do a lot of preparation when the weather’s good because sometimes the weather is challenging, as it has been the last few weeks.

When it’s rainy, dark and cold — even snowy in some spots! — Cruzio is out there making sure all our equipment is working properly. That can mean sudden calls, late nights, and cold, wet conditions.

We take our responsibility as a lifeline service very seriously. And we’re proud to have a crew committed to making things work, even when the going is tough. Special thanks to Ali, Dan, Jay, Frost, and the rest of the team. That’s a 24/7, all-weather group.

This article was featured in our newsletter. To read more content from our newsletter, visit our archive page and sign up for our email list.

2018 has come to a close, and as we do every year we wanted to take a look back at what an incredible year we had last year. Of course our biggest achievement was completing our very first “fiberhood” in Downtown Santa Cruz, bringing Gigabit Fiber to hundreds of homes and businesses, but we’ve done much, much more on top of that. Come join us as we take a look back, and look ahead to 2019.

We Built Gigabit Fiber to Homes and Businesses in Downtown Santa Cruz

After years of development, construction, planning, and perseverance, we were proud to announce this year that our first fiber build in our downtown neighborhood is complete! On August 30th, we lit up our very first all-fiber customer in the El Rio mobile home park. Of course, we immediately ran a speed test and saw unbelievable speeds of 956.20 Mbps for downloading, and 942.49 Mbps for uploading.

Since then, we’ve installed dozens more Fiber users, and introduced them to the same kind of speeds, for only $49.95/month. And we’re just getting started! Over the next few months we’ll be hooking up the rest of the folks in our first “fiberhood.” The first, we hope, of Cruzio’s many Santa Cruz Fiber neighborhood projects. If you’re living or working in downtown Santa Cruz right now, just let us know and we’ll be happy to sign you up as soon as we can!

Our Fiber-Backed Wireless Service, Wireless Pro, Has Expanded Even Further

In addition to our brand new in-the-ground fiber, we’ve also taken great strides in expanding our fiber-backed wireless service, Wireless Pro, to even more areas than ever, especially into areas that were previously well outside of range.

We built three brand new access points in 2018, including one along 41st Avenue that allows us to reach into Capitola for the first time with Wireless Pro. We’ve also built new access points near the Santa Cruz Elk’s Lodge and up at the UCSC Faculty housing up to the north in the Westside. Take a look at the maps above, if you live in any of these areas, let us know, and we’ll be happy to hook you up! And looking towards 2019, we’re planning to ramp up our new new access point construction even further, so keep your eyes open, as we may be coming to your area very soon!

Our Email System Is Safer, Slicker, and Better Than Ever

If you’ve got an @cruzio.com email address (or one of our many other domains like @baymoon.com or @ebold.com, for that matter) you’ve seen a big improvement in our email service this year. We dramatically increased mailbox capacity, the size of emails you can send out, and improved our spam filters exponentially when we switched over to our brand new email server. We even rolled out a brand new webmail client that looks and works better than ever. And best of all, our new email system still upholds our values of never harvesting your information and selling it like most providers would.

It was a massive undertaking all things told. During the upgrade we spoke with and met literally thousands of you all during the upgrade to make sure your email settings were correctly worked out ensure the upgrade was as smooth as possible. So make sure to give a big thank you again to our wonderful staff again for their hard work! And if you’ve still got any questions about your new email, check out our email FAQ, we’ve got answers for you!

We Built Out Free Public WiFi to Watsonville Plaza

Last year, we expanded our Wireless Pro services throughout Watsonville, and as a result this year we were able to bring services to South County like we’ve  never been able to before. That’s why earlier this year, we started a new service to give back to the community. We began our new initiative to bring free WiFi to Watsonville Plaza in downtown Watsonville.

We partnered with The City of Watsonville, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District and the DigitalNEST to build access points throughout the Plaza, so families, students, and really anyone else, can sit in the park and have access to the internet.

Looking Toward 2019

2018 saw one of the biggest additions to our network in Cruzio’s history, with the completion of our Downtown Santa Cruz Fiber network. We’re going to ride that wave into 2019, a year which marks another huge milestone for us: our 30th Anniversary! We’re getting set to hold our biggest Open House Extravaganza ever to celebrate the occasion. We’re also looking to expand to more people than ever, but most importantly we’re going to celebrate tenants Cruzio was initially founded on those 30 years ago:

Do Right By Our Customers.

Do Right By Our Team.

Do Right By Our Community.

We wish you a Happy Holidays, a Happy New Year, and we hope your 2018 was as good as ours, and we wish you  an even better 2019.

Cheers,

Chris, Peggy, Mark, James, another Chris, Sandi, Colin, Adia, Jesus, Alison, Dan, Justin, Andrew, David, Alex, Brooke, Ani, Max, Iasha, Laurie, Alana, Brian, Cameron, another Cameron, Dillon, Jay, and Jason;

Our fantastic apprentices, Spencer and Jessica, and intern, Lidia;

Jake, Annika & Carly (the grown “kids”)

By Chris Neklason

When we first started Cruzio Internet back in the eighties, we were excited by the promise of the emerging new digital communications medium. If everybody was linked through this new network, the old gatekeepers and filters of publishing would be rendered moot! Everyone would have the power of a printing press, a radio and television station at their command!

Thirty some odd years later, yes and no.

From one perspective, this is the golden age of digital publishing. Through blogging and email newsletters, millions of new authors ply their words for a previously unavailable readership. Millions more publish their visual and photo art, and multitudes of talented filmmakers, podcasters, musicians and performers are reaching a vast global audience, sometimes with little more than the camera and mic of their mobile phone.

But over time, the corrosive effects of the advertising and marketing-driven attention economy upon civil society have been revealed, and the rapaciousness of some players in the attention industry have aroused concern.

Consider the current state of the local daily newspaper business: trapped by an obsolete business model under predatory ownership, unable to meet the needs of the community, and oblivious to the rise of its successor on the near horizon.

Our local newspaper is the Santa Cruz County Sentinel. It used to be owned by the McPherson family, but was sold and resold and resold over the years as many local dailies were, until it is now owned by Digital First Media which is itself owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund.

There’s ongoing concern about the water supply here in Santa Cruz County because of the drought cycle. Some years there’s plenty of water, and for long stretches, not enough. As a citizen, I want to know more about the state of the local water supply. How does it work? What’s the plan to keep it working? What’s in play right now? What are the citizen inputs?

This information is collectively “known” to the Santa Cruz County Sentinel reporters who have written stories about the issue over the years, and to various members of the community. But the only way to use the newspaper website to access that collective knowledge is to go to the site search box and enter the word “water” and then read through previous stories which have the word “water” in them. As an alternative, one can pull up an article about “water” and work the “related article” links at the bottom to the same effect.

So after 30 years of Internet, the digital experience of trying to acquire knowledge about a topic through the local newspaper website is the exact same as having to thumb back through a stack of dead tree newspapers.

Newspaper websites are the way they are because it satisfies the customer requirement, and the advertiser is the primary customer in the attention economy.

Attention being a finite resource, advertisers pay a lot of money to capture a slice. All of the innovations of the attention industry are focused on better capturing human attention and better delivering a more effective payload to human eyeballs.

This is touted as “creating a more personalized user experience” and manifests, when I go to Amazon and look at a power saw, as an ad for that power saw thereafter chasing me across every website I visit until I die, and then continuing to harass my descendents.

Meanwhile, my needs as a citizen to understand how something works in my community is represented exactly nowhere in the attention economy.

Compounding the poor fit of that business model with the ongoing mission of local journalism are the interests at play in hedge fund ownership.

It’s not in the interest of the hedge fund ownership to invest in evolving the local news business in any other direction because the hedge fund is not interested in the local newspaper as an ongoing concern or invested in any way shape or form in its mission.

Hedge fund ownership considers it a win if the local newspaper folds as long as a large profit over the equity investment is made within an appropriate (short) window of time. This leads to a death spiral of cost reductions leading to a reduction of reporting leading to lower readership until the newspaper dies. The hedge fund will just strip the corpse for parts to sell and move on.

To survive, local journalism needs to make the jump to an alternative business model under alternative ownership.

Humans are social animals. We’re also civic animals. Over 60 million Americans volunteer every year. People want to do more than share content. People want to share their knowledge and energy for the good of the community. People want to raise barns.

While much is made of the size and success of the attention economy, one of the more interesting things to come out of the Internet is the rise of the online participation economy. Specifically, platforms offering tools with which people collaborate and coordinate their efforts to do good.

Change.org claims 200 million users. On Kickstarter, 5 million users have backed 15 million projects. GitHub has 28 million users and an estimated annual revenue of $300 million. Meetup.com has over 30 million users, Stack Overflow over 9 million. Survey Monkey has 25 million users and $240 million in annual revenue. Wikipedia, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, has over 25 million registered users.

It’s clear the local newspaper I want will be born of this burgeoning economic sector because it will focus on my participation and my requirements. Empowering me is the whole point of the participation economy.

So my future local newspaper won’t just stream information about what’s happening, it will also accumulate knowledge. The knowledge I want about the local water supply will be presented as something like an up to date Wikipedia article, with links to related information such as water commission budgets and commissioner contact information.

It will include current and historical water quality information collected from local creeks, beaches, school drinking fountains and kitchen faucets, presented in tabular, map and other modern information visualization formats.

It will include an online forum where members of the community can discuss water policy or argue about the cost of different approaches or trade water quality test results.

It will maintain a directory of local civic groups including those active and interested in promoting a better water supply.

It will maintain a calendar listing upcoming meetings of the water district and water invested community groups, and it will let me sign up for reminders and alerts.

The local newspaper I want will utilize an information architecture in which I am not a member of an audience or a product, I am a member of the community and a participant.

The local newspaper I want won’t display any commercial advertising.

It will be crowdfunded.

It will develop an internal online platform to manage and administrate reporting, knowledge accumulation, community building, ideation, workflow and policy development, and support itself by selling subscriptions to those tools to outside civic organizations such as Elks, Indivisible, the California Association of Realtors, the Santa Cruz County Business Council and other groups working in the community.

It will develop and monetize civic intelligence through paid newsletters and advanced analytics for premium subscribers.

It will make alliances with the local library, museum, schools, public radio and community television groups.

It will collaborate with community members hosting Internet-connected weather stations, web cams, and air, water and other environmental quality sensors.

It will foster a community of correspondents, wiki editors, contributors and participants.

The local newspaper I want won’t be a newspaper anymore. It will be a knowledge base and knowledge exchange.

But sadly, it doesn’t yet exist, and local journalism following the business model of the attention economy and the ownership of hedge funds is clearly doomed.

This is brought home by the fact that now 30 years later Cruzio owns the building in downtown Santa Cruz originally built by the Santa Cruz County Sentinel.

Thirty years ago, we never dreamed how ubiquitous the Internet would become. We had high hopes, some since fulfilled, some yet to be achieved.

The evolution of the business of local journalism is among the yet to be, but there is hope for the near future.

While ownership might be sanguine about the relentless rounds of firings and layoffs and reduction of coverage, journalists and j-schools are not, and are leading the discussion about next generation business models and methodologies.

Blogging is growing up and the blogging platform ecosystem is overlapping more into newspaper publishing and community building. The development roadmap of Automattic, maker of WordPress, looks especially promising for the next generation of local journalists.

And perhaps most important, Internet users are not only becoming more comfortable with crowdfunding and paid subscriptions to tools and reliable information, they are demanding to participate in the economy not as passive customers but as active stakeholders.

It’s inevitable that as the digital community building ecosystem and the participation economy grow, someone will finally put the pieces together.

And I’ll finally get the local newspaper I want.

Future Motion choose Siklu’s EtherHaul 8010FX to provide 10Gbps speeds in downtown Santa Cruz

Future Motion is a high-tech startup based in Santa Cruz, California, a beach town just a short drive from the heart of Silicon Valley. Future Motion makes the Onewheel, an innovative powered board that is ridden like a skateboard but with one wheel and a suite of technology “bridging recreation and transportation.”

With the university, the boardwalk, world-class surf and a thriving creative culture, Santa Cruz is far from your typical small town. But until recently it did have one thing in common with a lot of communities of its size – it lagged a generation behind its larger neighbors in access to high-speed connectivity. Regional and national fiber and DSL providers don’t see a huge opportunity in Santa Cruz and as a result are slow to deploy, leaving gigabit access a hit or miss proposition for not just residents but business entities.

Many times this situation results in a young up-and-coming company being forced to relocate to a more densely populated area where gigabit connections are available at affordable prices. Hence the founders and much of the culture that the company was based on are uprooted and transported, all in search of affordable high-speed internet access.

Future Motion was in this exact situation – their success seemed to be driving them away from their roots resulting in the city losing not only a burgeoning tax base but the innovation and creativity that started Future Motion in the first place. Searching for a way to remain in Santa Cruz, Future Motion reached out to Cruzio, a local and award-winning independent ISP who was already leveraging mmWave wireless systems from Siklu to bring multi-gigabit access to the city. Future Motion had a fiber feed to their existing building, with an EtherHaul™ 1200 series serving as a 1Gbps wireless redundant link.

The business was booming, Future Motion was adding staff and had outgrown their initial facility and need to move in order to expand. Their choices were to stay in the middle of town where fiber might be available, and pay the extra rent or relocate to Silicon Valley.

Enter Cruzio and Siklu with a wide array of multi-gigabit mmWave solutions available. Freed from the constraints of incumbent telcos and fiber plants Future Motion was able expand the search to larger, cheaper outlying facilities still in Santa Cruz. Working closely with Cruzio, Future Motion were able to identify a new location and verify they would be able to connect at speeds up to 10Gbps using Siklu’s EtherHaul™ 8010FX to their POP in downtown Santa Cruz.

With access secured and the new facility identified Future Motion was able to stay in Santa Cruz, keeping the culture that started the company and providing a roadmap to other startups on how to blend high tech needs with a small town quality of life.

Cruzio, with mmWave as part of their offerings, have been able to expand rapidly throughout the county with less risk and at a faster pace. Before spending the money to lease or extend a fiber connection, Cruzio brings up to 10Gbps to a locale via Siklu. Over time as the demand grows the business case for a fiber link may be justified – but only once the customers are already there, greatly reducing risk.

“With Siklu’s mmWave solutions we have been able to grow our network organically, and deliver in days the multi-Gigabit connections Santa Cruz demands,” says Chris Frost, Director of Infrastructure & Technology at Cruzio, and avid OneWheel rider. “We fully plan to leverage this model and expand to other communities with similar needs, and Siklu will be our mmWave solution.”

This blog was originally posted on Siklu’s website:

Siklu delivers multi-gigabit wireless fiber connectivity in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Operating in the mmWave bands, Siklu’s wireless solutions are used by leading service providers and system integrators to provide 5G Gigabit Wireless Access services. In addition, Siklu solutions are ideal for Smart City projects requiring extra capacity such as video security, WiFi backhaul, and municipal network connectivity all over one network. Thousands of SIKLU carrier-grade systems are delivering interference-free performance worldwide. Easily installed on street-fixtures or rooftops, these radios have been proven to be the ideal solution for networks requiring fast and simple deployment of secure, wireless fiber. www.siklu.com.

Our first all-fiber neighborhood is complete in downtown Santa Cruz and we’re busily lighting up the first homes and businesses with scorching Gigabit Fiber Internet. It’s been a long and challenging construction project but it’s done, and now downtown Santa Cruz has a broadband infrastructure asset in place that will fuel creativity and growth for decades to come.

We’ve been super-stoked by all the positive feedback we’ve received from businesses and residents. It’s been really gratifying to hear how many local businesses and residents realize the value of competitive, Net Neutral, truly superior broadband to their homes and businesses, and see the long-term positive effect this new infrastructure is going to have on our downtown.

We’re on the lookout for neighborhoods who need better broadband – let us know!”

The City of Santa Cruz has been a helpful partner too, utilizing their own “dig once” policies to join the project and connecting several key City-owned sites. We love thinking big and we’re ready to revisit the city-wide partnership, or some other big project any time. If you think the City of Santa Cruz should prioritize broadband, let them know!

So what’s next? Well, a lot more network growth, a lot more broadband deployment and more and more gigabit speeds. Even as we’ve been building the downtown fiber, we’ve been expanding our fiber-wireless coverage in new areas and offering new 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps connections. We’ve already boosted and bolstered our fiber-backed network on the Westside, in Live Oak and in Watsonville, adding more and more redundancy and reliability and hooking up several big buildings and businesses to crazy-fast direct fiber.

More Gigabit Neighborhoods to Come!

Once we’ve hooked up the early adopters in the downtown neighborhood and we’re comfortable we’re seeing a successful business model, we’ll start looking for our next fiber ‘hood — which could be a residential neighborhood, an apartment complex or HOA, or another awesome mobile home park like trendsetting El Rio.

The best news is, new technology that’s emerging means we’ll be able to offer more and more gigabit service in an ever-expanding area. Where fiber makes sense, we’ll build fiber; where fiber-backed wireless makes more sense, we’ll use that technology. We’ve worked with businesses to link their separate facilities, city and county governments to bring free wifi to public places. We’re growing steadily and we’re also on the lookout for neighborhoods who need better broadband — so let us know!

We base our decisions on a simple question: what is best for our customers? To us, what makes sense is to use the best-of-breed technologies to connect as many people as we possibly can to the best possible broadband. Every Cruzio customer, whether fiber, wireless or Velocity, coworking or colo, helps build our network around the County. That’s the Cruzio way.

“You won’t ever need another connection because this one is so good.”

Construction’s Done!

At Cruzio, August 30th was Fiber Day. It’s the day we lit up the first customer in our first all-fiber neighborhood.

Fiber Day capped the first, we hope, of Cruzio’s many Santa Cruz Fiber neighborhood projects. Our first neighborhood covers most of downtown Santa Cruz.

Fiber — that means fast internet. The fastest internet. At $49.95 per month. Unprecedented. (By the way, are you in neighborhood 1? Then by all means, sign up now!)

Construction isn’t easy or cheap, but we had to build. There just isn’t good infrastructure available, so Cruzio took the plunge (into the earth, literally) and constructed an underground fiber network to every house, every office building, and every apartment complex in the area [see map].

This was a huge, multi-million dollar local investment by a small local company. No public dollars or grants were used. Eyes wide open: for future builds, we know that we can’t reach every part of the county without outside investment. We’ll need partners, and for the next expansion we’ll be looking for partners who are willing to go along with our principles — especially Net Neutrality and privacy for our customers.

In the meantime, we continue to expand our fiber in smaller increments. If you’re not in the first neighborhood, and you’re interested in fiber speeds, we’d love to hear from you.

What Will Gigabit Speeds Mean to You?

Now that construction’s complete, we can offer connections to the fastest network you could imagine. The interior cables are made of spun glass, which means that data travels at the speed of light. Fiber optics are safer (they don’t get hot, they’re not “live”) and use far less energy than older cable and phone lines. The network is overbuilt, meaning we’ve got pretty much unlimited capacity for any internet anyone wants for the next several decades.

Yup, decades. You won’t ever need another connection because this one is so good.

Any of These Interest You? AI,AR/VR/XR, HD, 4K, 5K, 3D

We want everyone in the county to have what we’ve had for many years at our building: scorching Gigabit internet — so much internet that it takes mere seconds to download a Netflix movie or upload your home video of a cat trying to sneak past a Great Dane.

Gaming, telecommuting, publishing, backing up data. AI, AR/VR/XR, HD, 4K, 5K, 3D. Symmetric downloads and uploads. All of these, and whatever crazy internet activities lie ahead, become a snap with a Santa Cruz Fiber connection.

And it’s local. And Net Neutral. And Cruzio respects your privacy.

Is Cruzio Competitive? Why, Yes

Now it’s time to make the first project a commercial success so we can build more. Our business plan shows we need to connect at least 33% of the people who live and work in the area in order to go forward with our next phase.

To make sure we get that level of market share, we’re “making an offer you can’t refuse.” Live or work downtown? We’ll give you a better connection than you can get anywhere else — a gigabit per second for $49.95/mo. That’s a price lower than what our competitors charge for way slower services.

Not to mention, again, the Net Neutrality and privacy Cruzio stands behind. That’s important to you and important to us. Plus we’re local and known for our customer service. We’re hoping you’ll subscribe and tell all your neighbors, too.

So join our network, help us get to more of the county and be rewarded with great, inexpensive internet at a low price. Just sign up here.

“Our Trailer park is right past the edge of your map,” she told us. “Can you extend the build over to us?”

El Rio Mobile Home Park, nestled by the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, has a lot of stories to tell. And now it has one more: the fastest internet of any mobile home park in the country. Working with Cruzio Internet, residents of this cool park can now get scorching Gigabit internet for only $50 per month. It’s one of the first Santa Cruz Fiber neighborhoods.

El Rio was founded as a fishing resort in the early 20th century, when salmon ran abundantly in the river. Newspaper clippings, nearly a century old, are in frames on the walls of its community center. There’s a proud history here.

Walking through the park, cars drive by only occasionally and the posted speeds are slow… and slower. As you walk in front of the single- and double-wides, park residents nod “hello” in a friendly way, especially if you’re wearing a Cruzio hat. They’re ecstatic about the new fiber internet. They know they’re special. But it wasn’t just luck — they asked for, and worked for, a better internet choice.

It took many months to get from planning to building to lighting the new Gigabit Fiber Internet, but the first customer watched her speed jump by a factor of 100 on the very first day. That person is also largely responsible for the park getting the network. Her name is Hilary Hamm, and she’s a Fiber Champion.

Cruzio Called for Champions

Early in our planning, we put out a call for neighborhood “champions” — people who wanted to get fiber to their street and were willing to talk to neighbors about it.

We were working on a big project: building fiber to every home and business in the City of Santa Cruz as a start and moving on from there. (Ultimately, Cruzio would like to cover the whole county with high-speed fiber and fiber-backed internet — that’s always been the goal.) That ambitious plan was slowed down as we decided to start with a single neighborhood pilot project.

Our first all-fiber neighborhood is the area around our data center and coworking facility. That’s a diverse, well-populated area in downtown Santa Cruz and a pretty ambitious project — we received no grants and no government funding. We met regularly with our Champions, presenting them with our maps and plans as we created them. And one champion had a comment.

Hilary Understood What Fiber Could Mean For Her Community

“Our trailer park is right past the edge of your map,” she told us. “Can you extend the build to cover us?”

We’ll certainly consider it, we said. But she’d need to get it approved, since the park is privately owned and managed by its residents.

Hilary and our team explained the possibilities to the park’s Board of Directors (she’s on the Board herself), and they approved. Because the neighborhood was so close to our build, and because her neighbors were enthusiastic — many of them already Cruzio customers — we did as she suggested. We increased our project just enough to cover the whole park.

What did we offer? Hilary let her neighbors know about Cruzio’s deal, which is what every other customer in the fiber neighborhood gets:

-Cruzio built fiber to every home in the mobile home park
-No charge for construction, no setup fees for customers
-Gigabit-per-second speeds for only $49.95/mo
-No obligation. No charges at all unless our service is purchased
-No contracts. No data caps. No throttling
-Net Neutral, open internet
-Unlike major carriers, we don’t collect and sell customers’ private information

Now we’re seeing those scorching speeds inside the mobile homes. Residents are going to be able to do everything a high-powered tech worker can do at a desk in downtown San Francisco or LA. But they can do it sitting in their home.

That’s So Santa Cruz

It’s a pretty Santa Cruz-y thing to light up a neighborhood of regular folks first, before getting to the larger businesses. We believe the internet’s for everybody and we’re proud to make it happen for this friendly community.

We believe El Rio is now the best-connected trailer park in the country!

Thanks Hilary! You’re a true Champion.

If you think your neighborhood needs better internet and would like to talk to us about being a Fiber Champion, please get in touch! We’re waiting to hear from you.

Cruzio’s spent many months and millions of dollars building fiber infrastructure under the streets of downtown Santa Cruz.

This is Santa Cruz Fiber’s first fiber-to-the-premises project, and we’ve supplemented by serving a much wider part of the County with fiber-fed fixed wireless connections — extending that fiber’s effect far and wide.

Fundamentally, we’re moving from a dependence on old copper infrastructure to brand new connections which will provide much higher data rates — higher and higher for decades to come. And we’re getting these services to as many people as we can as fast as we can.

We feel it’s a great investment for us and our community.

There’s still another big step before every location in the fiber area is “lit up” and getting the hyper-fast service. After the construction finishes up in the next few weeks, Cruzio needs to finalize and test the brand-new cables and connect them to our data center. Then we’ll “drop” the connections from our street fiber vaults directly to the homes and offices who’ve ordered service.

So we’ll be contacting people who’ve signed up for fiber in the next few months. We’re expecting to be all finished in October, with many locations served in the interim months.

That means now is a great time to sign up for fiber if you haven’t yet. Contact us and let us know you want it.

“Price/speed for downtown fiber and certified buildings: $49.95/mo, 1 gigabit (1,000 megeabits) per second”

There’s still another big step before every location in the fiber area is “lit up” and getting the hyper-fast service. After the construction finishes up in the next few weeks, Cruzio needs to finalize and test the brand-new cables and connect it to our data center. Then we will “drop” the connections from our street fiber vaults directly to the homes and offices who’ve ordered service.

So we’ll be contacting people who’ve signed up for fiber in the next few months. We’re expecting to be finished in October.

That means now is a great time to sign up for fiber if you haven’t yet. Contact us and let us know you want it.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve been very busy placing new access points for our fiber-backed Wireless Pro service throughout Santa Cruz – from Alta Vista on the Westside, to the Faculty Housing at UCSC, to the area near Dominican Hospital in the east. Now, we’re happy to announce that we’re bringing service to an area that’s been one of our most requested by far: Capitola!

If you see your home or business in the colored shape above, let us know! You’re now ready to get connected to speeds up to 100Mbps, with average speeds network-wide of around 75Mbps, for both uploading and downloading!  On top of that, your speeds will automatically get better as technology improves. All of this comes at a flat $99.95/month, with no taxes, no hidden fees, no data caps, and no contracts.

So if you live in this area, let us know! And if you’re in Capitola but not in this area, stay tuned. We’re excited to bring our fiber-backed network to Capitola, and we’re looking forward to building better service throughout the city in the future. This is just the starting point for our fantastic fiber-backed services in Capitola. We are constantly assessing tall buildings and structures to further improve and extend our network. If you know of any, let us know and we can check it out for free!

You’ll often hear us Cruzio folks talking about how important privacy is to us, an ISP. We’ve spoken at length about how we won’t mine or use your data, or how we won’t ever sell your data to third parties. But what exactly does that mean? What data’s being collected, and who exactly is affected? You might’ve seen the much-retweeted post recently from @iamdylancurran outlining all the things tech juggernauts like Google and Facebook were keeping and tracking. Well, we were so blown away by that, we decided to go through the steps ourselves.

Below are 8 links and settings that you can look at on Google and Facebook that will tell you exactly what data they’re getting from you, so you can take a look for yourself.

1. Google Knows Exactly Where You’ve Been:

https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

If you have a Google account, and location services is on (most of Google’s services require location services to be turned on, so you most likely do) then Google can show you exactly where you’ve been since it’s been on. If you click through the above link while logged into your Google account, it’ll show you on a map all of the places you’ve been throughout your account’s/mobile device’s history, and even how long it took for you to get between places.

If you don’t like this timeline, you can turn it off by hitting the “Manage Location History” button and switching the feature off at the bottom of the screen. Note that this means it just stops plotting the data on a map for you to see. It’s not stopping Google from collecting the data through location services however.

As a quick aside, Google Location Services is what allows Google’s apps and apps that use Google’s account services to know where you are. Google Maps’ navigation, for example. Of course, Google can use this data to advertise to you. For example, seeing an ad for a nearby restaurant when you’re close by.

2. Turns Out Deleting Your History Doesn’t Delete Your History On Google:

Myactivity.google.com

If you’ve ever deleted your browser history and thought it was over and done with, that’s not quite true. Google stores all of the activity that’s been done on your Google Account, and you can see a record of that on the link above. And this stays around even after you delete your search history. Keep in mind this isn’t just searches, but also stuff like app usage, video history from sites like YouTube, and more. It’s surprisingly thorough.

If you don’t want this data displayed, you can change these settings on your Google Account so that it won’t show this stuff in your timeline. You can find all of these options right here: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols. This will let you pause the timeline feature, or even delete your entire timeline history from being shown on your account. It will also stop them from being able to use this data to affect your search your results though, so your search results will no longer be personalized based on your previous usage patterns.

3. Google Knows What You Like, and Targets Ads Toward You:

adssettings.google.com

Google’s biggest money maker is its advertising business, so it’s no surprise that Google’s algorithm uses all the information it knows about you to can target ads that you’ll probably want to click on. If you want to see what Google “thinks” about you, you can click through to the link above and it will show you demographics that it thinks you fit into and subjects that it thinks you like.

On this page, Google actually does give you the option to turn this off. It even lets you delete and add topics that you may or may not be interested in, if you want to make the targeting more or less specific.

4. Google Keeps A Record of Every App You’ve Given It Permissions For:

myaccount.google.com/permissions

Have you ever opened an app and signed in using your Google account? Or allowed it to access parts of your account, like Location Services or Contacts, when you opened it? Most apps these days require some sort of permissions, so the answer to that is likely yes. At the link above, you’ll find Google’s list of all of the apps you’ve given permissions to, and it lets you edit or delete those permissions. Keep in mind, if you do decide to change these permissions, it could affect the ability to log into or use these apps.

5. Google Keeps Track of Your YouTube Search History:

youtube.com/feed/history/search_history

Google knows every search you’ve made, video you’ve watched, comment you’ve left and community you’re a part of on YouTube, and keeps a record of it. At the link above, you can take a look for yourself and see their history of YouTube videos you’ve seen. You can also delete that history if you wish, and pause/stop the site from showing this history on this page.

6. You Can Get A Copy of ALL of Your Google Data (Spoiler, it’s big):

google.com/takeout

If you really want to know everything Google has on you all in one place, Google’s takeout feature is what you’re looking for. Google will send you a copy of all of your data from its many services (with some exceptions: they’re not sending you all your emails from Gmail, for example) in a series of folders. In them you’ll find records like your search history, all the YouTube videos you’ve uploaded, your Contacts, and your transaction history on Google Pay, among many, many other things.

7. Facebook Also Lets You Download A Copy of Everything You’ve Done

Moving on to Facebook, this site also lets you download a copy of all of your information, though you’ve got to jump through a couple of hoops to get there. If you want to download it yourself, log in to Facebook, click the down arrow in the upper right of the screen, then click on settings, then find the link on the page marked “Download a copy.”

Once you have it downloaded, you’ll have a folder that contains logs of all of your Facebook chats, every file you’ve ever been sent on Facebook, all your photos, and even every sticker you’ve ever sent, and much more.

8. You Can See What Facebook Thinks Your Interests Are

By checking Facebook’s settings, you can also see what interests and personality traits Facebook thinks it knows about you, for the purpose of targeting ads on your Facebook feed. To take a look at these, click the down arrow again, and go into Settings. Then, in the left-hand column, click Ads. From there, click Your information, then Your categories.

There, you’ll see a list of traits, such as what Facebook thinks your political leanings are, what devices you use Facebook from, what interests you have, and when your birthday is. Facebook lets you delete these traits if you think they aren’t relevant to you as well.

These 8 things you can look at are just the tip of the iceberg as far as what data about you that’s left on the internet. This is what Google and Facebook are being transparent about, as these are publicly accessible tools on their respective platforms. It’s quite likely that there’s a lot more data out there about you from Google, Facebook, or other websites that isn’t quite as transparently available.

Listen, don’t get us wrong, we love the openness of the internet and we think Google and Facebook are fantastic, innovative companies who have developed world-changing platforms.

But this is why we here at Cruzio Internet and Santa Cruz Fiber don’t mine your data: we believe that what you do on the internet is your business. It’s not our business, and certainly not some other company’s business. We don’t track what you’ve been searching or what pictures you’re messaging your friends, because we don’t think that’s right. We know that you’re an actual human being, and not a collection of data that can be used to sell a car.

By changing your privacy settings, voicing your opinion and supporting companies who share your ethical concerns you’re helping build a better internet for everyone.