Santa Cruz and San Mateo have a lot in common. We’ve both got great lighthouses, for one

We’re delighted to announce that Cruzio Internet and Coastside.Net are joining forces. Because we’re such similar companies, and we’ve been friendly for so many years (decades!), this should be an easy and beneficial merger.

Most important things first: if you’re looking to login to your Coastside.net email login here.

Below we’ll try to answer your basic questions about the merger. If you have any questions about this or about your services or account, reach out anytime at Cruzio.com/contact.

Who is Cruzio?
Cruzio is one of the oldest independent ISPs in the country and in recent years we’ve grown our wireless and fiber service footprint significantly. As we’ve expanded, we’ve worked with community partners to include low-income families through our Equal Access initiative, which we hope to expand in San Mateo County.

OK, who’s Coastside.Net?
Coastside.net is San Mateo’s largest independent ISP. They cover large areas of Half Moon Bay, El Granada, Pescadero and La Honda, and all the way into Palo Alto and Redwood City. They offer similar services to Cruzio and have been around for almost as long.

I’m a Coastside customer, what’s this mean to me?
First of all, nothing will immediately change. You’ll still keep getting a bill from Coastside and enjoying the same great service. If you need customer service, just contact Coastside as usual. Over the next weeks and months we’ll be combining our operations and you’ll start getting billing statements and support from Cruzio. As we combine our resources, we’ll have more ability to support you, and we’ll also be strengthening the network, and even rolling new services in the Coastside footprint.

How do I contact Cruzio if I need support?
All our contact info is available at cruzio.com/contact. You can call us at 831.459.6301 or toll-free at (800) 303-3302, or swing by and see us sometime at 877 Cedar St #150, Santa Cruz CA.

I was a Skyline wireless customer, what’s this mean for me?
The Skyline wireless network is now part of the Cruzio network. We’ll be working with the Coastside team (including Bill, the founder of Skyline) to make sure the Skyline network is better-maintained than ever and we’re offering the best possible service and speeds.

Will you be keeping an office in the Half Moon Bay area?
We have no immediate plans to move from the current offices at 525-B Obispo Rd in El Granada. As the months pass, we’ll be looking at our office and warehouse space needs.

What about my Coastside email address and/or website?
No change. Your Coastside.net email address will continue to function as before. Coastside-hosted websites will continue to operate in the same way.

What’s happening to Rob and Steve?
They’re still on board! They’re joining the Cruzio team and will continue to be integral parts of daily operation, supporting all our customers and helping build a better and bigger network.

What does this mean for me as a Cruzio customer?
Nothing immediately. But by joining forces with Coastside, Cruzio is now significantly better equipped to grow, build better products, and support and maintain our local, independent network. The future is bright indeed.

For real? That’s a big expansion of Cruzio’s coverage (I hear you’re going to Monterey too?). Are you sure you can maintain service quality?
A big part of why we joined up with Coastside is to bring on the skills and experience of a talented team. Rob and Steve have years of experience running a network and by adding them to Cruzio’s team we dramatically increase our abilities to serve our community. We’re also hiring new techs and expanding all the time. If you’re interested in joining our team go to https://cruzio.com/careers/

I’m looking the Cruzio website, seems like you offer some higher speeds — can I upgrade my connection?
We’re bringing higher overall broadband capacity to the Coastside network right away and will be looking at where we can offer faster speeds very soon. If you want to register interest, go to faster.cruzio.com and fill out an inquiry. We’ll get back to you as soon as we have news.

Hello Everyone,

I have some very exciting news to share with you all … Coastside.Net is now part of the Cruzio Internet family!

I am proud to say this is not the end of Coastside.Net, rather the next chapter in our evolution of doing what we love: providing quality internet in today’s fast-paced digital age with personal, friendly service and support. This next chapter is the merging of like-minded people to do bigger and better things.

Steve Dennis and myself will continue to be integral parts of daily operation and always available to support you. We wish Jeff the best on his retirement, and to Austin with his continued studies at CSU Chico. We are blessed to have the continued advice and support of Bill Prince and Georgia Stigall, who did the heavy lifting to make Skyline Broadband a reality.

I am excited to join forces with the awesome folks at Cruzio. Like Coastside.Net, Cruzio’s roots date back to the dawn of the internet. And, like Coastside.Net, Cruzio is independently owned and committed to being a valued partner in the community.

On behalf of myself, my family and all Coastside.Net staff (past and present), I want to thank you for your patronage and support over the years. We look forward to being part of the bright future of Cruzio and continuing to bring you the high level of service and support that you deserve.

Best,
Robert Genovesi

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Entrance to San Jerardo Cooperative

Equal Access Santa Cruz is taking its model for closing the digital divide through community partnership and community engagement to new areas of need. Equal Access Monterey Bay is a new partnership between Cruzio Internet, Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, the Central Coast Broadband Consortium. Its first project is to bring reliable wireless internet to the San Jerardo housing cooperative located just outside of Salinas.

Thanks to a grant from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), Cruzio Internet has been awarded $292,548 to build the infrastructure needed to connect every home in the cooperative. Equal Access Monterey Bay hopes to raise another $200,000 to provide the service completely free to residents for the next 5 years.

The San Jerardo housing cooperative was built by farmworkers in the 1970s. The site was an abandoned labor barracks, which the farmworker families first used as a squatting camp then purchased and transformed.

These families and workers face innumerable challenges. Many members of the community are low income and recently the situation has been even harder as the co-op has faced great difficulties and increased costs related to their water supply. Like many low-income and rural communities across the nation, they also struggle with access to an important resource: a reliable and affordable internet connection.

Addressing the need for real, affordable broadband at San Jerardo would be of immense value to the San Jerardo Cooperative residents who, like the farmworker community as a whole, are struggling.

According to the LA Times, “farmworkers in the state earn about $30,000 a year if they work full time — about half the overall average pay in California. Most work fewer hours.” In fact, the most recent U.S. Department of Labor National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), the average total income of farmworkers is between $15,000 – $17,499 a year for individuals and $20,000 – $24,999 for a family, far below the median income in Monterey County which was $71,015 in 2019.

General manager Horacio Amezquita’s family members are original co-op members and he is intimately familiar with the challenges the community faces.

“The community of San Jerardo is a farmworkers housing Cooperative that needs affordable and reliable internet access. Students here do not have a reliable internet connection and are not able to stay connected in their school classes. Many families in the community can not afford to pay for a reliable internet service. Communities like San Jerardo need to have affordable and reliable internet access for the well-being of present and future generations.”
— Horacio Amezquita, General Manager, San Jerardo Cooperative

Horacio Amezquita, General Manager, San Jerardo

In October our team made a trip out to San Jerardo to survey the site and start making plans for the infrastructure build. Once complete, this project will bring internet directly to the units of 250 permanent residents and 100 seasonal residents, making a huge difference in their day-to-day lives and access to resources.

To help support this project go to Community Foundation for Monterey County.

A high-speed fixed wireless internet distribution site (Point of Presence or PoP) on a PVUSD building in Watsonville.

By Peggy Dolgenos and Susan True

An internet service provider, a school district, and a community foundation walked into a zoom room…

What sounds like the beginning of a boring COVID-era joke is actually the true story of an extraordinary cross-sector partnership of industry, philanthropy, and education that has brought internet access to hundreds of families in the Pajaro Valley through Equal Access Santa Cruz County (EASC).

The Problem to Tackle

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 face 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.

Double Jeopardy

In order to start bridging the local digital divide, we had to address the core issues—a lack of internet infrastructure in many parts of the County, especially the Pajaro Valley, and families being unable to afford the monthly internet bill.

Problem-solving the technology was fairly uncomplicated for a company like Cruzio. But they needed a philanthropic partner to help raise funds, and act as a place where donors’ gifts could be entrusted and stewarded. With four decades of experience bringing together people, ideas, and resources to tackle the most pressing problems in our community, the Community Foundation was a natural and eager partner.

Cruzio’s high-speed fixed wireless internet distribution sites (Point of Presences or POPs) can be built quickly and at a fraction of the cost of fiber. The Cruzio team installed POPs on PVUSD school buildings, with each site capable of serving 150 or more users. And free or heavily subsidized service was made possible through gifts to the Community Foundation’s EASC fund, bridging the affordability gap.

Luis & Thom from Cruzio install internet infrastructure at Buena Vista Migrant Labor Camp.

The Community Comes Through

When we bring the community together, we get things done. Donations came from groups like the Rotary Club of Watsonville, local companies–including a major grant from Driscoll’s and another from Reiter Affiliated Companies, and many generous individuals. Your donations to EASC have made a meaningful difference in the lives of hundreds of students and families.

Mahia Aguilar, a Aptos Junior High student, told us that thanks to EASC, she didn’t need to go out to the park looking for free internet. A single mom whose child attended the distance learning support program at the Farm Discovery Center (where we connected high speed broadband) told us that she was able to go back to work to help feed her family.

Equal Access Santa Cruz County By the Numbers

This is what your generosity helped accomplish.

Next Steps

The internet is an essential educational tool whether students are in digital classrooms or back on campus. They need it to access assignments, for research, and to stay on top of work during absences, which during this time of COVID are many, as students face exposure and climbing cases.

Phase 1 of Equal Access exceeded our expectations. In the next phase, new internet sites are already planned as we continue our partnership with PVUSD, add coverage in Live Oak, and collaborate with Pajaro Valley Shelter Services. We’re developing a new partnership with Santa Cruz Housing Authority and other affordable housing developers to bring gigabit-speed internet to hundreds more families across the county.

You can help support the work ahead by giving to the EASC Fund. Together, we will close the digital divide in Santa Cruz County.

About the Authors

Peggy Dolgenos is the CEO of Cruzio.

Susan True is the CEO of Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.

More stories about EASC impact:

Good Times: How Equal Access Santa Cruz County is Bridging the Digital Divide

Video: Bridging the Digital Divide

Continue reading →

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!