To get fiber to every building in the City of Santa Cruz, Cruzio has divided the town up into 26 separate neighborhoods. Each will have its own hub leading back to Cruzio’s powerful Internet backbone.

Every neighborhood has about 1,000 homes or fewer, based on what a hub can comfortably accommodate and how the terrain is laid out. Our engineers drew borders along major roads and environmental barriers like arroyos or creeks.

We’ll build to as many neighborhoods as we can right off the bat. And neighborhoods will have priority based on several factors, the most important of which is enthusiasm. If we know we’ll have plenty of customers in a neighborhood, we’ll be much more likely to build there.

To see who’s interested, we put a survey up at SantaCruzFiber.com. The survey, along with a count of our existing customers, will be critical in determining whose neighborhood gets gigabit service first.

How’s your neighborhood doing? Check the next blog post to see.

Here’s a map showing where the neighborhoods lie:

Fiber neighborhoods in Santa Cruz

If you’re like us at Cruzio, you get excited about planetary events. This Sunday, September 27th 2015, is a peachy one. There will be a total lunar eclipse at the same time there’s a harvest moon — the biggest moon of the year. The moon looks big when it’s close, and this is the closest it comes, or the “perigee.”  It will look 14% bigger than usual.

The moon will also look red. Here’s why.

Here’s when to look for the eclipse on the West Coast:

   Pacific Daylight Time (September 27, 2015)
   Partial umbral eclipse begins: 6:07 p.m. PDT on September 27
   Total eclipse begins: 7:11 p.m. PDT
   Greatest eclipse: 7:47 p.m. PDT
   Total eclipse ends: 8:23 p.m. PDT
   Partial eclipse ends: 9:27 p.m. PDT

Note that sunset on September 27th is supposed to occur at 6:58 pm. It won’t be fully dark for much of the event. This, plus our often-present fog, will make it less dependably spectacular than it might be in other parts of the country. If it’s too foggy to get a good look, as an alternative NASA will be streaming the event live. 

So will Sky and Telescope.

And you’ll be able to go back and look at the video afterward, if you miss it.

Here’s the visibility predicted for that day:

Fingers crossed for clear skies! See you under the moon…

We noticed some new markings on the street yesterday and wondered what they were. Maybe you did, too.

The City of Santa Cruz Public Works Department knows what they are. Here’s the explanation they sent out, with some photos — it’s not on the City’s website yet so we just copied it from a press release.

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What a great party!

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The FCC can protect the internet. Or it can let giant corporations police themselves.

The Internet has revolutionized communication. No doubt about it. Any John or Jane Doe can post on the Internet to express their thoughts or display their wares. The cost of publishing is low; the cost of reading is low, and there’s a vast variety of Web sites in ever-new formats.

At Cruzio, we provide our users with the ability to read anything on the Web and to write anything they like, just so long as they don’t break any laws. That’s called net neutrality.

What’s Net Neutrality and How Does It Affect Us?

Net neutrality means that carriers like Cruzio should continue to let Internet sites get to your computer without favoritism or, worse, censorship. Without net neutrality, Internet service providers like Cruzio, but also like AT&T, Time Warner, and Comcast could charge some Web sites for accessibility. You wouldn’t be able to get some sites as fast as others. Perhaps you wouldn’t be able to get some some sites at all. That would significantly change the way the Internet works.

If you were a large internet provider who owned a news network, and no one could tell you not to, would you make your own news programs the easiest to watch?

Under net neutrality, Internet providers and telecomm companies have flourished. Web-based businesses such as Google, Ebay and MySpace have emerged from small beginnings to capture wide public acceptance.

But after years of telecomm consolidation and deregulation, the era of open, neutral access to the Web may come to a close. The big telecommunications companies may simply have enough clout to change the way the Internet is set up so they can favor their own corporate partners.

What Can We Do About It?

Some people say consumers will never stand for corporate-controlled access to Web sites; that any such attempt will “spur outrage.” That remains to be seen.

Currently, large telecommunications companies are pushing Congress to pass the “COPE” act — H.R. 5252. It is slated to come up for a vote soon, with little public fanfare and much corporate backing. Advocates of net neutrality say this bill is a threat. You might want to learn about it and express your opinion to your representative on the subject. For more information, here are some useful sites:

http://savetheinternet.com/
http://www.eff.org/