Tag Archives: Fiber

The 2009 Fiber Cut — Five Years On

Five years ago today, on April 9th 2009, Santa Cruz awoke to a world completely cut off from the continuous, uninterrupted communications we are now all so used to. To this day we don’t know for sure what happened (despite the $250,000 reward offered) but, as best anyone can figure, sometime in the early hours of the morning vandals took a chainsaw to AT&T’s fiberoptic backbone out of the county — and everything went dark.
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Could Santa Cruz be the next “Gig City”?

Santa Cruz has always been known as a beach community, an oasis where Bay Area citizens can escape into the sunny bliss of rolling surf and beautiful redwoods. However, in recent months, Santa Cruz is making waves in another way, following Kansas City, Chattanooga and Lafayette in creating a hyper-connected “Gig City.”

But where other cities have relied on public funds or the efforts of large corporations, the Santa Cruz high-bandwidth network is expanding through partnerships between local ISP Cruzio and private building owners.

In 2010, Cruzio opened its own office and coworking facility, Cruzioworks, with a direct connection to Silicon Valley via 10 gigabits of fiber-optic Internet. Small businesses and technologists flocked to Cruzioworks. Soon after opening, the 12,000 square foot space was almost filled, to over 90% occupancy.
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Fiber Night: Oh What a Night!

Last Friday Cruzio put on the ritz. Fiber Night!

In the context of the Internet, “fiber” is the way we transport data from one place to another — really, really fast. With lasers.

To celebrate Cruzio’s new fiber connection to the Internet, we held a big party. With lasers.

People enjoyed our fantastic coworking space, opened up to the public for the evening.

The fiber connection is the beginning of our new independent high-speed network.
We are now offering connections at 100+Mbps — even connections over a gigabit per second! And we’ll soon be revamping our lower-cost services too (we’re looking at late summer for an unveiling).

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The Fiber Cut — One Year On…

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the fiber-optic cable cut that left much of Santa Cruz in the dark for more than 24 hours. (Otherwise known as The Great Internet Outage of 2009.) In our debriefing meetings at Cruzio in the days and weeks following the incident we discussed what happened, why it had the impact that it did, and how to make sure it didn’t happen again.

So what did happen?
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