Beautiful views and difficult terrain for internet in Bonny Doon

Lack of internet in rural areas is an enormous problem, affecting people all over the USA — even in large parts of tech-savvy California. And despite Santa Cruz County’s part in bringing about the internet we know today, some parts of our county lack decent internet too.

As alert newsletter readers know, Cruzio has been sounding the alarm about inequality of internet access for many years. Then, earlier this year, the issue hit home in a devastating way. Some of the copper lines Cruzio leased from AT&T had degraded so much that we could no longer provide reliable service to a small number of our more rural customers. That left a few dozen customers in a bind. Their service wasn’t good, sure, but what else could they do?

Dooners Take Action

The rural residents didn’t take the situation lying down. Many had been through tough times already last year, when fires destroyed so much of their community. They’d had to deal with rebuilding and many other challenges. And here was another: internet. We were disturbed that options were fewer than we’d imagined for some folks, and kept searching for answers.

Bonny Doon residents Phil McManus and Jodi Frediani got super-involved. They appeared with us on a KSQD radio show. We accompanied them to meetings and made public appeals to local elected officials. After so many years of no action, we were worried that folks would be left without options. But the Dooners got the attention of Representative Anna Eshoo, and that was key.

Anna Eshoo to the Rescue

Anna Eshoo is co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus and a Member of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology in the House of Representatives. That means she is an important political figure in the telecommunications world.

When Eshoo heard of from the activists, she, in turn, took action. She arranged calls with AT&T executives who could actually make a change to the situation — something Cruzio had never been able to do. AT&T did not, unfortunately, promise repairs which would allow us to keep the customers, or provide better service or lower prices. But they did prevent the Bonny Doon folks from losing internet access altogether. AT&T had been refusing to sell DSL service to people (or to Cruzio) in those areas for years. But now they made an exception. They offered to take on a dozen former Cruzio customers — the folks who’d appeared on the radio. along with their neighbors.

But Cruzio knew of several households in other parts of the county who were in the same boat. We insisted they get the same treatment as those who’d spoken up. In the end, despite protests from AT&T, everyone who we knew was left out in the cold was transferred to AT&T service.

We Reach a Compromise

So the story has an ending that’s not exactly happy, but not a disaster, thanks to the efforts of the good folks in Bonny Doon… and to Anna Eshoo, along with Jimmy Panetta, Mark Stone and Ryan Coonerty, who sent a joint formal request to AT&T. Special mention to the staffs: Patty Kim and Asad Ramzanali from Eshoo’s office, Mark Denning from Panetta’s office, and Maureen McCarty who works for Mark Stone — we know staff members often do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work and we want to call out their contributions. They answered our calls, looked for solutions, and helped the elected officials with all the details.

The moral of the story: ignoring telecommunications regulation is perilous. The change in the last few decades away from a public utility model, with universal service and regulated price requirements, has resulted in a free-market free-for-all. Subsidies and grants meant to equalize access are often manipulated by the largest telecom providers to pay for existing, inadequate infrastructure. Rural and low-income areas are starved. Inequality increases.

And We Shouldn’t Drop the Ball — It Could Make a Huge Difference in our County

The new subsidies promised in federal infrastructure bills are still on the drawing board. We hope that Congress does a better job of making long-term improvements to needy areas this time around.

And we’ve had some victories at the state level, thought details are still pending.

Ernesto Falcon from the Electronic Freedom Foundation writes:

“If you live in California, now is the time to talk to your mayor and city council about your future broadband needs. Now is the time to talk to your local small businesses about the future the state has enabled if they need to improve their broadband connectivity. Now is the time to talk to your school district about what they can do to improve community infrastructure for local students. Maybe you yourself have the will and desire to build your own local broadband network through this law.”

Don’t continue the mistake of using government grants to be determined by current assumptions. We saw in the pandemic that current infrastructure isn’t adequate to the work-from-home school-from-home world that’s going to persist into the next decade. We have to build for a future that makes it possible for everyone to share in that new paradigm.

And please know that every time you tell Cruzio you want better internet access, we are logging your query. We are sharing areas of the county that need better infrastructure with public works departments and public advocacy groups. Stay involved and help us get better, more equitable access to Santa Cruz County the Central Coast. Anna Eshoo and the Bonny Doon activists let us know we can really have an effect.

Good work by Santa Cruz Parks & Rec, who changed the name to London throughout their Fall 2021 guide

Why did the misspelling persist for so long? The man and the mistake are threaded through our local history.

Who Was London Nelson?

An early hero of the City of Santa Cruz, London Nelson is memorialized by the eponymous building and several plaques around town, hailed as friend to education. He was a slave included in an expedition from Tennessee to Northern California in search of gold in 1850 — when California was filled with fortune-seekers, many of whom kept their slaves despite the establishment of California that year as a free state.

Nelson’s group found gold, and London Nelson used his share to buy his freedom in 1854.

Ill health — and perhaps good sense — kept him from returning to Tennessee. Instead, now in his 50s, he moved from the Sacramento area to Santa Cruz — another sensible choice — and lived here for the rest of his life. Nelson never married here (we know nothing of his previous life in Tennessee). He was popular with his neighbors, selling vegetables and repairing shoes from his garden plot by the San Lorenzo River, behind the current post office. It’s said that he enjoyed watching local children trek past his house to their school up on Mission Hill. Uneducated himself, he valued the school, and when the it closed for lack of funds he was determined to help.

Nelson had no nearby heirs. When he died in 1860, he bequeathed his property to the school district, signing his will with an X.  Eventually his small farm was sold, the proceeds going to the construction of a beautiful new schoolhouse on Mission Hill (long gone now). His was one of the first graves in Evergreen Cemetery, and for many years schoolchildren made an annual pilgrimage to tend the grave.

Abolitionists or Racists? Both.

What happened in the decades and centuries following London Nelson’s death is a picture of a conflicted society. Nelson had been one of only two Black residents of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was a stronghold of abolitionism before and during the Civil War, according to historian Geoffrey Dunn, and didn’t hesitate to honor a Black man. He was beloved while he lived and celebrated after his death. At the same time, he was the subject of sometime virulently racist news articles and his name was misspelled, his legacy muddled.

Georffrey Dunn has also written a more recent description of London Nelson and the effort to correct his name in The Good TImes.

What’s in a name?

Note from Cruzio’s CEO

Recap: on March 17th, 2020, Cruzio sent employees home and closed our coworking doors to all but essential workers. Those among us who were pessimistic spoke darkly of months of closure. Even the most negative didn’t foresee over a year of distancing, masks, and lost shops and restaurants.

Our Network Has Been Busier

Internet is an essential business, so Cruzio stayed mostly open while taking many safety measures. Our onsite technicians followed a strict set of protocols when working at people’s homes and offices. We expanded our Equal Access Santa Cruz (EASC) program to get internet to hard-to-reach places around the Central Coast, with added urgency as we saw schoolkids having trouble participating in their suddenly online classes. We were able to extend internet to low income housing and migrant farm camps and, with our community’s help, we’ve made a difference to many families — and more each month.

Our Building Has Been Quieter

Cruzioworks, our coworking space, protected members and staff by keeping occupancy to a minimum, putting strong HEPA filters on our air conditioning units, and sanitizing obsessively. We put tables and chairs outside so folks could meet in the fresh air  — an amenity so pleasant we’ll keep it in the future. Our onsite cafe closed — for a few weeks, then a month, then indefinitely. We’re still waiting for it to open, it’s the best little cafe in town. Our busy meeting rooms were limited to just a few occupants at a time.

Our neighbors in the building, the cheerful folks from Ecology Action, went home to work as well. The building has felt kind of empty. Not completely shut down but quieter and darker.

Last August/September, as fires raced down the Santa Cruz Mountains, several Cruzio employees were forced from their homes. We put a few up in the office. Colleagues lent air mattresses and they camped out, waiting for days for the signal to go back home. A long-time coworker’s house burned to the ground. The air itself choked us. Those days were shocking and sad.

Like so many people and businesses, as the pandemic months stretched on our daily lives changed radically.

Our Community’s Recovering, But in a Sputtering Way

And now we’re out of those worst times (really, the fire was the worst, right?) but we’re in a a sort of limbo.

Last month, a change back to normal seemed hopeful. Mask ordinances lifted. We scrubbed off the social distancing stickers on our floor and stopped locking our front door during business hours. We started planning a marketing campaign: “Reboot.” The idea, and what we talk about every day: how can we help to revive the Santa Cruz County economy with faster internet, price breaks, and expanded service? We’d like to see the shopping streets busy and lively again. We want to help.

But as the Delta variant pushes up the number infected, it’s clear we still need to be careful. Shops and theaters need to keep things slowed down a bit.

Internet work’s not slowing, of course. In fact quite the opposite. We’re hard at work getting things to go faster. It’s an inverse proportion: the more people can’t go out, the more internet they need. Closed theaters means more Netflix. Working from home means more Zoom. So we’re busy.

In the next few months I hope I’ll be able to send the “reboot” message we were planning for this month. Fingers crossed. Stay well!

Cruzio was founded by people from Santa Cruz, and our staff is hired and trained right here, too. That makes Equal Access Santa Cruz a project of neighbors helping neighbors.

We’ve been building where the need is great

Our team just spent several weeks setting up connections for migrant labor housing communities east of Watsonville. Hundreds of children live there, and need internet for school. There’d been no internet at all prior to our arrival, so it was quite a job. Fortunately Cruzio’s fixed wireless technology — when conditions are right — can connect remote locations quickly and economically.

Residents pay just $15/mo, or even pay no fees at all, depending on their situation — thanks to generous donations, all from local sources. (You can help with the next project, see how.)

The homes were within sight of one of our Watsonville points of presence, and luckily had no large groups of trees, tall buildings, or mountain ridges in the way. (We generally love trees and mountains, but they can be trouble when we’re building our network.)

We wanted to have everything set so kids could get online right away. They’d already missed enough school.

This housing is occupied only from spring to fall, and families were gone for the winter. We wanted to have everything set for their return so kids could get online as soon as famillies returned. They’d already missed enough school.

We started work in early January. Families were due back by April 1st. So we had a short time frame to complete all the connections and wire up every one of 143 buildings in Buena Vista and its neighboring camp, Tierra Alta. From day one, it was go-go-go. Our infrastructure and system administration teams laid out the network plans — with networks, that means keeping track of hundreds of numbers and paths, both physical and logical. Then Adia Schamber and her Field Operations crew took over. 

Construction started January 18th. Children would connect to their Zoom classes as soon as they moved in — if we finished in time. The schedule was tight.

And then it rained. 

Remember the epic downpour in January?

We needed to hurry, so this rainstorm was a bummer…

Tony Guizar Orozco, who led construction at the camps, reported:

“A big challenge we faced while working on this project was getting all the physical roof and cable work done while it was pouring rain outside. We can’t do any roof work while it is raining, so when it began to come down, we had to halt the work on the roof and focus our attention on other work that we can do on the ground. Even in full rain gear, It is quite difficult to run exterior cable while it is raining, and especially difficult to terminate it.

Cam Kennedy, a co-worker, came up with the solution to use a rain canopy to shelter us from the rain while we worked. This allowed us to continue the cable work on the ground while waiting for an opportunity for the rain to stop and finish the roof work — a simple solution that allowed us to continue being efficient in less than ideal conditions. “

So we didn’t lose even one day of work to the rainstorm.

…but when the rain ended we had a rainbow

Rain was just one of the hurdles

Then there were windy days when getting on a roof didn’t seem like a good idea. And the complicated ballet of COVID: to keep chances of infection low, crews aren’t allowed to combine or trade personnel, so one person’s absence can ripple into a day’s lost work for several more people. It also leads to a litany of precautions and procedures causing multiple miniscule delays: “My mask broke, can you bring an extra?” “I left the hand sanitizer in the truck, wait while I go get it.” All that may seem quaint someday, but it’s been a very real part of our work this year.

Our county badly needs rain, but the lack of rain — aside from the one downpour — did help us finish our labor camp installation in record time. We were able to work almost every day. It also helped that the Buena Vista housing is empty for the winter, so our staff was able to move quickly without bothering people. Managers expected to finish about four houses a day; we ended up finishing 10 a day, and on one memorable afternoon, Tony messaged that he and the team had finished fifteen.

But there was one last holdup…

Chris Frost brings hardware, but there weren’t enough brackets to keep routers off the floor

In the last half of March, as we were congratulating our team for their neat, efficient work and the fast internet our tests exhibited, it was time to do the last task. The wifi routers.

We like to mount our routers up high on a wall, securely fastened in place away from spills, toddlers, and pets — who can all be death to electronics, as we all know. Adia, our Field Operations Manager, had ordered the brackets with plenty of time — throughout the project she’d been careful to have equipment ready when it was needed.

But right at the end of the project, as we prepared for residents to return on April 1st with their kids, pets, and spills, our wall mounting hardware was delayed by the manufacturer. 

On March 15th we were told the parts wouldn’t arrive until April 5th. That meant residents would find their routers on the floor when they moved in. Not acceptable! Adia called. Emailed. Pleaded. Got stern. The mounting hardware isn’t expensive, it’s not glamorous. It just didn’t, at that moment, exist. We tried to come up with alternative plans. But there was nothing as quick or as neat to install. So Adia kept after the manufacturer.

After weeks of pushing, at the last minute the manufacturer found some supply and shipped it to Cruzio. Tony and the crew rushed down to Buena Vista and buttoned everything up. And there it is today,  about 140 houses nicely kitted out with top-of-the-line equipment.

Our fine team: Luis, Tony, Ignacio, and Thom

It takes a team to wire a village

With all our experience and training in the past several years, our team works well together. Chris Frost and James Hackett are overseeing the whole program, working with community members to identify and prioritize where we can do the most good. Alison Lowenthal and Mark Hanford architected the network, and Adia planned every installation down to the last detail. Her team — Tony, Ignacio Espindola-Hernandez, Luis Ruelas, and Thom Gilbert— spent weeks wiring every residence in the camp. The farmworkers are returning household by household, and they have high speed, reliable internet for the first time ever.

This isn’t your Grandpa’s internet — it’s fast!

Our network is a permanent installation, so it will outlast the COVID crisis and provide internet service for families for many years to come. And like our other fixed wireless services, we can upgrade gear when technology evolves.

Folks in the farm labor housing — like all our residential customers — don’t have to sign long contracts, so they’ll get the low-cost, high speed connections for just the months they need it. They’ll have fast speeds for uploads as well as downloads, great for Zoom calls and sending videos to friends, families, Instagram, whatever. We don’t collect and sell their data — or anyone’s — to marketing companies and we are net neutral so their viewing choices won’t be throttled. And our customer service is friendly, local, and bilingual. 

There’s so much more to do

No sooner had residents started moving in to Buena Vista than we started getting messages like these: “My friend that lives in buena vista has great internet and lives in the middle of nowhere like me, can I get it too?”

But reaching such remote locations often requires expensive, all-new infrastructure. It’s going to be a challenge to continue finding funding for communities that are low-income, rural, or both. Cruzio continues to look for every way we can to expand, whether by accepting donations to subsidize low-income families or by working with local residents who have tall houses who can serve others in their neighborhood. 

This work is not easy but it is rewarding. We’re already planning our next projects. Be a part of Equal Access Santa Cruz! Here’s how to donate. Everything helps!

Photo credits: Cam Kennedy, Alana Matthews

Many Cruzio staff members have been working from home for over a year now.

Cruzio’s  logo is a kitty, at a computer of course. And it’s based on our real life experience. During the pandemic, our cats often join us at work. So helpful!

Cam found that his cat, Fang, almost matched our logo.

Or, another approach:

Other cats— this is Molly — simply fill in where needed. Sorry, James. Seat taken.

When it’s meal time, the cat gets a little closer.
Hello Iasha. Remember a little thing called feed me now?

And drawers are not just for pencils. This is Fulton, who is “always sleeping on the job” according to his person, Chris Frost. Thoughtful to devote the whole desk drawer to comfortable cat naps!

Checking email in bed? So is Georgie, Carly’s foster kitten

And we’re going to sneak a pup in here. Ziggy’s watching his shows.

Sometimes a kitty’s just got to take a bath, gracefully but firmly, right on the keyboard

Or drift off to sleep, longing for the “return” of her person, and perhaps a nice dinner to boot

Cruzio’s logo is a cat, but we also love dogs. While working from home, Cruzio staff have been uploading pictures of their canine companions and we noticed a trend. What’s with dogs and blankets?

Yes, there is a dog in here:

It’s Murray!

Sometimes, Murray seems to be using the Force.

Ziggy also uses the Force, but is not yet achieving the Jedi Master level of calm. It’s been suggested that Ziggy is with the Dark Side, but we don’t buy it. He’s a good boy.

And then there’s Max’s dog Wasabi, who prefers the burrito, or rather the “dogrito,” blanket configuration

Ziggy is often ensconced in luxurious comfort but never seems calm

Back to Murray. In one of his many blankets. Murray has it down to an art

And as Murray’s person,  Jesus, mentions, Murray will completely immerse himself in blankets, exposing only a sniffer to ensure no treats are missed. Extra points for the four-blanket configuration, the current record.

Yes, Murray does this all by himself.

Finally, a couple of cats who like blankets too.

Goodnight!

John, a Cruzio staffer, took this photo of an actual customer site.

First, be assured that if you haven’t been contacted, you are not affected by the end of these services.

If you are a subscriber to the small number of affected connections, we’ve already sent you email and snail mail letting you know there are only a few months of service left. We’re helping people find alternatives. We’re comping free email service. We’re sometimes sharing a few tears!

What’s happened is that we’re in a race. Cruzio needs to build our own infrastructure around the county to provide service to our community before AT&T decommissions the copper phone lines our older services use.

We’ve been part of an effort to force telephone companies to maintain their lines longer than they wish, and we’ve had some success, though we’ve lost money on the services for years. But some of the longest, oldest infrastructure has been failing. And, reluctantly, service on those lines has deteriorated so badly we will have to let a small number of our accounts go.

More details:

When we build our independent network, we build a solid foundation for the future. Our fiber and fixed wireless services are fast, reliable, and scalable. We’re very proud of our work.

In the past, all our customers were on lines leased from AT&T, built back when telephone companies were granted state monopolies in return for universal service and price regulation. We still have a lot of customers on leased lines where the service is reasonably good.

But in some parts of the county, on our oldest services (which we call DSL 1.5, or DSL 3.0, or DSL 6.0) we have seen a decline in line quality that, since we don’t own the wires, we can’t repair. Some customers lose service for weeks or even months before AT&T even sends a technician to look at their lines. We get distressed calls from our customers, and call AT&T in turn again and again, to no avail. It’s AT&T ‘s plan to drop those lines as soon as they’re allowed. We’ve already been warned that end-of-life on the leased network may come as early as this year. And they’re letting the lines deteriorate in the meantime.

We could no longer charge for such crummy service.

And, though we’re building as fast as we can, some of the places where the copper was deteriorating aren’t yet reachable by our newer network.

We emailed a small number of customers, some of them longtime customers, that their service would be discontinued. And it broke our hearts to do it.

Of course, when some parts of our network are discontinued, other people may hear rumors and think, “is that me, too?” Rest assured that if your service was being retired, you would get months of warning (we sent out emails in February for service cancels in June, and are following up with postal mail and phone calls for good measure).

Cruzio lost this race, and it was a tough loss. But we hope someday to reach every part of the county again. We’re building our independent network out rapidly, building 20 new Points of Presence (PoPs) around the county so far this year alone, each node serving up to hundreds of customers. We’re working hard to serve our county.

Many of us spent a lot more time with our pets than ever before. We shared our funny photos with our colleagues on a company Slack.

New dog in the house! Not coming out.

Bath day sucks

Lana sparkles in her cone. What a trooper!

Georgie was looking casual in the laundry basket, so a friend went into Photoshop and…

Georgie’s attitude is much more appropriate in a sports car

“There’s a small intruder in my house and he keeps insisting he’s Toby Jones.”
Who’s Toby Jones?

This highly respected British actor. Or a puppy. Hard to tell them apart.

This happens to everybody who has a cat, doesn’t it? You want to get up, but…

There is a dog here somewhere

These are not taken on the same day. Murray and the blankets are a constant.

And finally, another celebrity look-alike pet, this one is…

Mother Theresa!

Cruzio has been working with the Pajaro Valley Unified School District for months to get reliable, fast internet to all the students who need it. We’ve been installing high speed broadband at their homes since springtime and have connected about 50 families so far.

And we love these students. They’ve been in online classes for weeks now and they’ve been telling us how much it means to have a good connection.

Here’s who they are and what they have to say! We’re hoping they stay in touch so we can see where they are years from now. We suspect we’re looking a the future leaders of our county — maybe a mayor or a county supervisor in the bunch.

First, a couple of middle schoolers made videos and they’re fantastic. Karyna even translated her statement into Spanish after she speaking with impressive poise in English. As Cruzio’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Jesus Lopez, put it: “I’m not crying, you’re crying.”

We’re also enjoying some photos and quotes from other bright kids:

This is a fantastic family from Freedom: Mom and Dad Johnna and Daniel, and son Isaiah.

“It was difficult at first for me to do my school work because I had no Internet connection.  Now that we have it with Cruzio, I am able to communicate with my teacher all the time and do my school work.  I no longer have glitches when I am participating in class.”

— Isaiah, Freedom Elementary Student

“When Distance Learning began, we had no Internet and we needed it.  Being connected was extremely necessary and Cruzio provided the opportunity so my son could participate in classes. “

— Father: Daniel 

Another awesome family. We’ve been so impressed with the efforts of both parents and kids to keep up with schoolwork in the pandemic. How about this fantastic trio:

“It has been great having constant access to the Internet! I can hear my teachers clearly and there is no lagging in my connection.”

— EA Hall Student, Lesly

“Para mi este servicio fue muy bueno porque no tenia Internet en casa y me dieron la oportunidad de tenerlo en casa gratis durante tres meses. Cruzio instalo la antena y proporciono el cable totalmente gratis y ahora pago $14.99 al mes.”

— Elizabeth , Lesly’s mom

Translation- “For me, this service was great because I did not have internet access at home and they gave me the opportunity to have it free for three months. Cruzio installed the antenna and cable totally free and now I pay only $14.99 per month.”

Looks like Mahia enjoys our foggy coastal weather…  Another great kid with lots of promise.

“Having Internet helped go to school and participate in the classes I’m in. I am able to do my homework and I don’t need to go out to look for free Internet. I was a bit scared when I had to park to get Internet to do my class work.”

— Mahia, Aptos Jr High student

“Para mi, un bill era un gasto más pero los hotspots no siempre funcionan.  Busque opciones de Internet de bajo costo pero no encontraba.  Mi hija y yo usabamos el Internet público en la biblioteca de la ciudad o en algún otro lugar donde hubiera Internet gratis y nos quedabamos en el carro para que hiciera sus trabajos escolares.  El gerente de Cruzio, quien hablaba español –  algo muy importante para mí, nos ayudó muchísimo y pudimos conectarnos al Internet en casa a un costo más aceptable para mí después de recibirlo gratis por tres meses.”

— Mother: Rosario

Translation- For me, another bill was one more expense, and our mobile hotspots didn’t always work well. I looked around for low-cost Internet options but could not find any. My daughter and I used the public internet in the city library or any other place where there was free internet and we stayed in the car until she was able to complete her school work. Cruzio’s manager, who spoke Spanish – which is something very important to me, helped us a lot and we were able to connect to the internet at home at a reasonable cost after receiving it free for three months

By the way, the Cruzio manager Mahia’s mother refers to is Jesus Lopez, who worked tirelessly to make sure all the families were well-informed and comfortable with getting internet installed in their homes.

It’s been hard getting Jesus to stop calling every single family, but now our field ops and front desk staffers Carlos Serna and Antonio Guizar Orosco have been helping, too. Thanks, Carlos and Tony!