About Cruzio

Founded in 1989, Cruzio serves high-quality, affordable internet to homes and businesses in Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and Monterey Counties. Cruzio has a significant market share—about 9,000 households and businesses—and a long history of reliability and responsiveness to customers.

As one of the largest independent internet service providers in California, and a registered Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC), Cruzio is entrusted with providing internet and technology services for more than 2,000 local businesses, including notable organizations such as:

  • The Santa Cruz Warriors
  • Joby Aviation
  • Granite Construction
  • Santa Cruz Public Libraries
  • Ecology Action
  • Santa Cruz Nutritionals
  • California Certified Organic Farmers
  • Chaminade Resort
  • Pacific Collegiate School
  • Santa Cruz County
  • The Cities of Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Capitola

100% locally owned and staffed, Cruzio has on-site technical support, local roving IT, and a welcoming storefront in Santa Cruz where members can drop by anytime to pay a bill or get advice from our technical staff. Cruzio is known for its friendly, hands-on customer service that caters to its diverse client population, from residents and local nonprofits to small and large businesses throughout the region.

Cruzio believes in the importance of community, being a business role model, being eco-friendly, and providing good wages for our employees. Cruzio offers competitive prices, provides services in Spanish and English, and donates services to dozens of local nonprofit and government organizations. We would like to see our region be a leader for technology and entrepreneurship, and we believe increased internet infrastructure is vital to that aim.

Cruzio continues to expand its services and grow the company to fit the needs of businesses and residents throughout Santa Cruz County. Our commitment to the local community ensures individual services that best meet the needs of our diverse customer base.

Cruzio’s Network

In 2009, Cruzio lit up 10 gigabits of fiber transport between our LEED-certified facility at 877 Cedar Street and the Level 3 (now Lumen) internet gateway in Sunnyvale. Since then, we’ve added an additional gateway at Hurricane Electric in Fremont.

These gateway sites are connected via fiber ring to multiple Cruzio locations, and connectivity to the greater internet is provided by Astound and Hurricane Electric.

Cruzio maintains a hybrid fiber/wireless network throughout the Monterey Bay, Coastal San Mateo, South and East San Francisco Bay, and Silicon Valley regions. Our widespread interconnected network boasts significant capacity and interconnection opportunities.

Our sites are protected from power failure through high-capacity battery backups and an on-call team of emergency responders who deploy generator power when outages occur—usually with no downtime to customers. Our data center is protected by an 80-kilowatt UPS system and redundant 150-kilowatt generators.

Cruzio’s high-speed fiber-wireless hybrid network is independent of large national companies such as AT&T and Comcast. We have enormous excess fiber capacity in downtown Santa Cruz, which we’re using to deliver extremely high-speed connectivity to nearby facilities including the Santa Cruz Library and the Warriors arena.

Since 2020, Cruzio has worked with school districts as well as state and local agencies to design infrastructure projects that bring next-generation service to our communities. Through multiple grants and regional philanthropic support, we’ve made gigabit wireless available to thousands of homes across our footprint.

Cruzioworks Coworking

The communications hub of Santa Cruz is Cruzio Internet, and the center of Cruzio’s network is our beautiful headquarters.
Located downtown near every possible convenience—restaurants, shopping, transportation—Cruzioworks is a coworking and colocation facility where people create and collaborate at breathtaking internet speeds.

With flexible workspaces, gigabit-speed Wi-Fi, spacious private offices, an on-site coffee bar, and several conference and classrooms, Cruzioworks offers everything connected entrepreneurs, artists, and remote workers need to be productive and happy.

In addition, the soaring windows and beautiful mid-century modern design create a wonderful spot for gatherings of up to 300 people—perfect for high-tech events, community gatherings, and showcases of local talent.

With our state-of-the-art on-site data center, Santa Cruz technologists now have access to colocation facilities for the first time. Fully redundant connectivity, power, and air conditioning at reasonable prices means your data and your people can now stay on this side of the hill.

The most important part of Cruzioworks is our members. We’re home to businesses as diverse as illustrators and lawyers, 3D print shops and local journalists, game designers and solar experts. The opportunities to network are almost infinite, and the wide variety of skills and experience gives the advantages of working for a large corporation with the freedom of working from home.

A Brief History

Way back in the late 1980s (eons in tech years), only people doing research at a university or for the military had access to things like email or message boards. A small but growing number of nascent techies believed there should be a public access alternative, and through their efforts, many small access providers came into being. Among them was Cruzio Internet, co-founded by Peggy Dolgenos and Chris Neklason, who continue to own and operate the company today.

After getting a business license in 1989, Chris and Peggy started working on a BBS-style (text-only) front end for the various Unix network tools that comprised the pre-web internet of those days. In 1991, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. In 1994, the release of Mosaic, the first graphical browser, caused use of the web to skyrocket. Cruzio’s customer base started to take off, and by the end of 1994, the owners quit their day jobs to work full time at Cruzio. Operations moved from their garage to downtown Santa Cruz.

In 2020, Cruzio launched the Equal Access program. Among the persistent inequities that became glaringly visible at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lack of internet access threatened to put students who already faced obstacles to their education even further behind during distance learning. Although students were equipped with Chromebooks and hotspots, internet connections were spotty and unreliable. Many were missing class sessions, unable to access online homework, and unable to communicate with their teachers.

Since its inception, Equal Access Santa Cruz has achieved remarkable success, connecting over 2,000 students and families to new, affordable internet access.
In 2022, Cruzio merged with our neighbor ISP Coastside.net, expanding our coverage area to the beautiful San Mateo Coastside region.

In 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved Resolution T-17810, giving the green light to Cruzio’s Equal Access Summits to the Sea (EAS2C) grant proposal. Using state-of-the-art fixed wireless hardware, Cruzio will rapidly deploy gigabit broadband to thousands of locations in this underserved region. EAS2C’s middle-mile infrastructure is “open access,” meaning other ISPs can hop on board to offer speedier, more reliable services to residents across the Central Coast. The network will lighten the load on smaller providers, paving the way for fairer prices and better service for all.

As the internet has grown, so has Cruzio. Serving the citizens of our community continues to be a real pleasure. We’re grateful to our members for voting Cruzio Best Internet Service Provider and Best Website for several years straight in the Santa Cruz Weekly and Good Times reader polls.