Author Archives: James Hackett

We’ve Got Your Back – How Cruzio Handles Phishing Schemes

privacy logo

Like all ISPs, once in a while, our email users get hit with a phishing scheme. Generally, they’re poorly done and obviously fake, at first glance. This weekend we got hit by a particularly nasty one.

As you can see, it looks pretty sophisticated: not too many obvious typos or grammatical errors. And they stole our logo and header!

example of phishing email

This email started hitting our mail users at around 9:30am last Sunday. As it happens, one of the first people to notice was our Chief Technical Officer, Chris Neklason, who right away saw it was a potential security threat to our users and alerted our support team. We immediately contacted the company hosting the rogue site, as well as our email filter provider. Within a couple of hours, the rogue site was taken down and the email had been blocked and deleted from our users’ inboxes. But not before about 100 of our eagle-eyed and responsible customers had notified us of the email and, sadly, a few folks had clicked through.

A couple of things to take away from this:

1. Cruzio has your back
We identify these threats quickly and we have tools to quickly neutralize them. If you do get fooled — and it happens to everyone — change your password and contact us immediately.

2. There are always tell-tale signs
Even though it was a relatively good phishing attempt, there are a few obvious clues in this that reveal it to be spam pretty quickly. First, the actual sender was not an @cruzio mailbox, it was a totally different domain. Secondly, none of the clickable links in the email pointed to the Cruzio site. Pro tip: you can always see where a link is pointing before you click it by hovering your mouse cursor over it — depending what mail tool or browser you’re using, the destination URL will show as a pop-up or in the lower part of the window you’re in. If you do happen to click on the link, most web browsers catch scams fast and almost immediately flash a warning on the page.

As a reminder:
* Don’t enter personal information into any site you’ve reached via email unless you’re 100% sure it’s legitimate. If you have even the slightest doubt, contact the company
* The more information an email asks for, the more suspicious you should be. For example, no one should ever want your Social Security number from an email message
* The more urgent the message, the more suspicious you should be
* There are so many scams, we can’t report every one. But if you see one you feel is serious, or if it’s for a small company, report it to the FBI https://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx

Bottom line: if you ever have any doubts about an email that purports to be from Cruzio, play it safe and contact us at cruzio.com/contact or call us at 459-6301 x2. Cruzio is keeping an eye out 24/7, 365 days a year to ensure your security.

Be safe out there!

Turning 30

This year, Cruzio turns 30. So we’ll spend some time throughout 2019 remembering what we built in the past and how it’s helped us build toward a better internet future.

Were you a part of the 1980’s tech scene in Santa Cruz? We’d love to talk to you. Just contact us and we’ll get back to you. If you talked to us for our 25th anniversary 5 years ago (has it been that long?), we’ll be trying to get in touch again. We don’t want to lose track of Santa Cruz’s place in the history of the internet.

We’ll be sure to have a party towards the end of the year. Watch this space, it’ll be a doozy!

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.

One Idea: Just Don’t Answer Your Email

Last month The Atlantic Magazine proposed an unusual solution to email overload. They call it “Inbox Infinity.”

This one’s the complete opposite of another recently popular idea, “Inbox Zero,” where you always empty your mailbox, every day. By contrast, Inbox Infinity means never answer your email at all.

“In 2019, I suggest you let it all go,” opines author Taylor Lorenz.

We’ll let you decide which result to aim for, but It seems like a good thing that people are working on this issue.

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.

When the Weather’s Bad…

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 At Cruzio: Gigabit Fiber, Upgraded Email, and Watsonville WiFi

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

41st Avenue and Portola Area

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”)

Getting The Newspaper I Want

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.

Cruzio and One Wheel/Future Motion – High Tech in Surf City

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:

About Siklu

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.

Santa Cruz Fiber – What’s Next?

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.

Fiber Construction: Phase One Complete

“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.

The Best-Connected Mobile Home Park in the Country – and the Woman Who Made it Happen

“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.