When the lights are out, Cruzio is on.

Sorry to bring this up amid the pandemic, but PG&E has been indicating that there may be power outages this summer, possibly similar to 2019.

To prepare for such outages, Cruzio invested in an enormous new generator in our downtown headquarters. It’s a backup to our existing backup generator, which is also enormous and powerful. And might be necessary — we want to be sure our network will continue to supply you with internet, even when a power outage lasts for days, as happened last year.

So this spring, while Cruzio was locking doors and sending employees to work from home, our system administrators welcomed the new generator. It’s hooked up, tested, and ready to go ahead of summer’s heat.

Now we wish power outages, which seemed so dire, were all we had to worry about.

Last year our heroic team (particularly Ali and Cam) kept nearly every customer running uninterrupted during the power shutdowns. We will do our best to keep it all going if there are shutdowns — major or minor — this year.

Be ready at home, too: we’ll keep our internet powered, but your home devices like computers and wifi won’t stay up unless you have an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) to plug your equipment into. Last year UPSs and generators were pretty scarce, and very high-priced, during the days-long outages. It’s probably a good idea to make sure you have the backup power you need before anything happens.

There’s no tragedy that doesn’t attract scammers.

With the Coronavirus, here’s what the FTC says to watch out for.

Basically, a lot of people are looking for funds from the government, whether for small business loans or individual $1200 relief checks. But the processes for receiving these aren’t always clear, and there are delays. That’s a perfect situation for scams.

“Brokers” and “agents” are already approaching people via phone and email, promising quick delivery of payments. Sometimes they pose as a bank or as a government representative.

Another type of scam targets people worrying about their health. Fake vaccines, fake medicine, fake tests.

And as always, be careful to check requests for charitable donations. We like to check Charity Navigator before giving. And it is a good time to consider giving, especially to hospitals and food banks.

To avoid fraudsters, it’s time to keep a sharp eye out. And tell your friends and family to watch out, too.

In a time like this, internet access is crucial. Cruzio is taking all the necessary precautions to stay safe while remaining fully operational to serve Santa Cruz County. All staff who are able to work remotely are now working from home. Staff working out in the field have a rigorous protocol to follow that keeps themselves and our customers safe. 



We provide “no contact” installs which eliminate the need to enter your home. Safety procedures for your install begin at the office where our Field Operations teams wear gloves and a mask at all times, and customer equipment is sanitized and boxed up before going to an installation. When a team goes out to install you, they will let you know they have arrived by phone call or a knock on the door. They will complete all of the outside work, leave your router at a window or the front door, then walk at least six feet away as you take the equipment. Then, we’ll walk you through the simple steps to plug in your router. We will perform a speed test outside the house to make sure everything is operating properly, and check with you for any questions before promptly leaving.

That’s our side of the process. We also ask all of our customers to be in communication with us. If anyone in your household or office space is experiencing symptoms of illness, please let us know so that we can reschedule accordingly. There is no charge for a canceled installation when it’s done for health reasons, and we encourage anyone needing to reschedule their survey or installation for health concerns to please do so. Our teams appreciate it!

We look forward to this crisis being over — when we can speak in person with our customers and provide more close-up assistance. Until then, we’re following county and state-standard guidelines to make sure we’re doing our part to stop the spread of COVID-19 while making sure everyone is connected at home.

It’s been a wild ride these last couple weeks. As I sit here in my bedroom, typing to the rhythm of mellowed out percussion on Death Cab for Cutie’s “Lightness” off the album Transatlanticism, it’s easier to reflect on this journey now that there is some distance between trauma and calm, between past and present.

Leaving our physical office space en masse was surreal, to say the least. But now that I’ve been away for over a week, working out of my room answering billing calls and Cruzioworks emails beneath a canopy of bachelor-esque wall decor, it’s becoming normal. There’s a radical card my dad made me a while ago featuring Rocky and Bullwinkle almost leaping right off the page, gesturing wildly with their arms as if to present the other wall art. There’s a full-sized movie poster for hit anime film Your Name. There’s a really frickin’ cool cardboard standee of Boba Fett, infamous bounty hunter introduced in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (fact check me Brian, but Fett was pretty instrumental in helping the Empire strike back). And every geek token has its place—carefully arrayed to maximize productivity.

Observing Fancy Friday from home.

Inspiration to clean

Working from home offers the same thing owning a virtual reality rig offers: inspiration to clean! Being able to focus on work in a professional office-like environment requires a clean desk, and VR requires two by two meters of tidy floor space. My room has never looked better. But lacking motivation my room quickly becomes as apocalyptic as our current existence. Which brings me to my next point. I can be lazy.

Mostly highs

For the low energy and uninspired, working from home is an incredible thing. There was one day this week when after getting to bed late I hit snooze more times than ever before, and when I finally got up, I had just enough time to walk four feet away to my workstation. I made it to work on time and immediately started answering calls. I groped around on the ground for a breakfast bar until I found something that resembled granola. It’s a lovely existence.

On lunch breaks, I’m able to fire up my gaming computer and play something online with one of my longtime friends. My housemates might be a little confused as to why one moment they hear “Cruzio Billing Department, this is Alex,” and then the next moment they hear “DIE NAZI SCUM! YOU’RE NO MATCH FOR MY COLT .45!”

Work is still work, just subtly different

The most significant change is the unsurprising amount of foot traffic I’m getting now. I had one walk-in yesterday. It was my housemate and he wanted to talk about nerf guns. I had a walk-out. But it was just me going downstairs to tell my housemates I fixed the internet. A large part of this week and last involved meeting the needs of Cruzio’s coworking tenants. The subtle difference is now it’s done via email and all the issues are caused by the crisis our collective conscience wrestles with.

Another one: I was on a conference call with my department and my colleague tells me my sound quality is crackling. I laughed and explained this was probably interference from my decorative steel katana I had been swinging between the wireless headset and the base station. It’s been a wild ride these last couple weeks. ~ Alex

The last couple of weeks have been an utter whirlwind. Providing customer support for our shared coworking space has been a unique challenge. There’s no roadmap for dealing with a crisis like this, so — like billions of citizens around the world — we’ve been figuring it out one day at a time.

This worldwide event sometimes feels like an action movie. We are living through the second most searched-for film on PS4: yes, I am referring to Pandemic.

Taking active and highly visible measures and then communicating those measures to our coworking community has been major in the early stages. Door handles, sink faucets, appliances, and anything frequented by human hands was sanitized twice a day. We have still been operating mostly like normal. Staff’s been taking every precaution, including washing our hands as soon as we set foot in our office. We’ve been taking advice from our community to heart, and did deep cleanings of the restroom walls, particularly around hand dryers.

Our friends at Peachy Kleen made a special visit and professionally cleaned our meeting rooms, the atrium, and every black fabric chair throughout the atrium last Saturday. On Monday I thoroughly wiped down the leather chairs in the Atrium.

Our efforts had two key purposes: to do our part to slow the spread of novel coronavirus to keep our community healthy, and to soothe our tenants in these tense and uncertain times. The optics of witnessing me wiping down a surface were almost as important as the wiping itself!

This goes straight to the heart of the importance of good communication. The CDC kept local governments informed of developments in the spread of coronavirus and Santa Cruz County followed other local municipalities and ordered a “shelter in place” effective Tuesday, March 17 at midnight. In turn, we did our best to publish the steps we were taking and relaying this information to tenants at every turn. We were figuring it out one day at a time.

I had the most surreal birthday yesterday. Most of our staff, nearly thirty people, packed up their essential belongings, computers, monitors, keyboards, mice — anything they might need to work from home. It felt like the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the resilient Rebels are evacuating the ice planet Hoth. And we all know that feeling.

Our field operations and sysadmin teams, undaunted by the task at hand, transported and set up remote workstations in bedrooms and on dining room tables of countless employees in countless homes. In less than a day, we had moved an entire company. We had never done this before at such scale.

I type this from my bedroom. I’m optimistic that with these extreme measures, through this bizarre mass social experiment, we’ll come out of this stronger and more resilient than ever. Like Empire this will undoubtedly get worse before it’s over. But ultimately, by the end of the sequel Return of the Jedi our heroes are victorious, evil is pushed back and vanquished, and everyone gets to throw a huge party with the Ewoks.

~ Alex

For folks who’ve been displaced and need to connect to the internet, Cruzio has set up several public wifi spots outdoors which you can access in your car or while social distancing. This internet is very fast and it’s free of charge. There’s no password.

We have many locations around the county. Some of our drive-ins are for students and their families — if that applies to you, contact your school district for info — but the general public can use the following locations to access the internet: 



Abbot Square
Downtown Library Parking Lot
Watsonville Plaza

“As a part of the community and provider of a crucial resource, we are compelled to help in times of crisis however we can. It wasn’t lost on us when schools announced the start of homeschooling that many students would face the burden of broadband access inequality. That’s when we started looking for parking lots to set up drive-in hotspots – spots where folks could access a reliable connection while social distancing in their cars. The need was realized again with the fires and these have become a public utility in an emergency”

We’ve been very active setting up school parking lots for the school year ahead. The fire delayed us but, hopefully, we’ll be back installing in the next few weeks. If you know of or own any parking lots next to tall buildings that could be viable for free public wifi access, please let us know at cruzio.com/contact. 


This year marks our 30th Anniversary, and as we do every year, we’re set to throw a massive party! But this year, as part of our party, we’re hosting something to really celebrate our landmark anniversary.

This year we decided to do something special: we’re hosting a Jingle Competition! We’re looking to find a song that gets stuck in your head forever and makes you think “Man, I could go for some locally owned, net neutral, fiber-optic internet right now.”

Well, we asked and you responded. So here we present our nominees for the new Cruzio Internet Jingle! We invite you to take a listen below and vote for your favorites. And be sure to come by the Open House Extravaganza on Friday November 1st to see who won (and also just to have a great time at another excellent party.)

Here are the nominees:

And please, let us know what your favorites were below, we’d genuinely love to know.

Here at Cruzio, we’re always looking to upgrade our network infrastructure and our members always get moved to the newest service as soon as humanly possible. We use best-of-breed technologies to connect as many people as we possibly can to the best possible broadband. Right now, as AT&T continues to pull back from supporting and maintaining the copper lines, we’re aggressively building out our independent, Net Neutral fiber-wireless network and moving as many of our Velocity ADSL users over to that service as quickly as we can.

If you’re upgrading from Velocity to Cruzio’s locally-owned and -operated, independent, open and Net Neutral network, here are a few things you might want to know.

What’s the new service all about?
For most folks, this is going to mean switching you to our ultra-fast high-speed wireless service, Wireless Pro. We call it Pro because it’s professional-grade — perfect for connected homes, home businesses or small to mid-sized businesses of all kinds. And our new low price means anyone can afford it.

How’s this going to work?
First step: a site survey. Site surveys come with no commitment or cost, and typically only take 20-30 minutes for our friendly, professional techs to get on the roof of your building to check line-of-sight to one of Cruzio’s many access points and plan any potential wire-runs from the roof to the building. We don’t need you to be present for the survey but if you’d like to be, no problem.

If you happen to be in one of our Certified Buildings (generally an apartment or office building), or if your house had Cruzio Wireless Pro in the past, things are even easier and we can generally skip the survey step.

Once we’ve confirmed eligibility, we’ll schedule the install. For new installations, we’ll mount a small receiver on your roof or eaves and then run wires into your home or office to connect to your wifi gear. If you’ve been living with older copper wiring, you will love the difference our professional work makes. The install will take a few hours and we’ll need a responsible adult there so we can access inside the property. Our techs carry ID and are great with friendly pets.

Is it good for WiFi?
Absolutely. Your internet will be faster. To take advantage of those speeds, you need a good wifi router. If you’re currently renting hardware from Cruzio, we’ll swap that out at no cost to you for a shiny new model. Cruzio recommended hardware is fantastic, and it’ll give you great wifi speeds and coverage and allow our techs to best support your service in the future. If you don’t currently rent hardware from us, now’s a great time to start. Just add one on the upgrade order form and we’ll install it when we upgrade your connection. If you’d prefer to keep your own hardware, no worries. We just can’t provide the same level of troubleshooting and don’t always anticipate performance will match the gear we recommend and deploy.

What about phone?
With mobile phones in all our pockets, we’ve found that many people aren’t using a home phone anymore. If this is you, great. The new service is internet only and blazing fast for all your cloud-based services. If you do still want to keep your phone, the new service doesn’t come with phone included but, don’t worry, we have options. Our recommendation would be to switch to a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone solution. Your new, faster, super-low latency internet service is perfect for VoIP service. There are many VoIP providers, but our research has found that Ooma is one of the best out there. You can grab an Ooma device at Best Buy or Amazon or, if you prefer, you can purchase the unit from Cruzio. It’s not a Cruzio service — Ooma will provide the phone connection and bill you going forward (it’s around $20/mo, much less than a standard landline), but you can get the hardware from Cruzio for $30. Your current phone will plug right into it, and you can keep your current phone number.

Cruzio’s Annual Open House Extravaganza and 30th Anniversary

Come celebrate with Cruzio! We’re having our annual open house the night after Halloween, and you’re invited! We’ll have all the usual, like awesome food trucks, craft beer provided by Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery, music (more on that in a little), and beautiful art. Free admission, free booze, all conveniently on First Friday November and at our downtown headquarters.

This year is especially important to us here at Cruzio, because we’ve officially been in business for a mind-blowing 30 years! We are very excited to commemorate that with all of our customers, city leaders, friends, neighbors, and more, and hope you can make it.

We mentioned music before, but this won’t just be a playlist of rockin’ 80’s music (though we are excited to have a curated playlist by our very own rockin’ James Hackett). We are having our first ever jingle contest! What’s that you say? Glad you asked. We’re offering a load of prizes (totaling out at $1,500) for writing and performing your take on a good jingle for us! Internet fame, cash, and the change to perform at our party! You can find more information at
jingle.cruzio.com.

We hope you can come and join us for this unforgettable night, and can’t wait to party!