WideOpen Blacksburg, located at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, announces it is now adding Fiber to the Home (FTTH) customers to their network at a record pace in Blacksburg and the New River Valley, and is starting to deliver Gigabit service to businesses including the Blacksburg New School.
The company’s Blacksburg-area backbone was completed in early June. Since then, fiber construction has moved into several Blacksburg neighborhoods, and hundreds more Blacksburg homes are scheduled to receive fiber connections this summer. The company provides the fastest Internet in the region, and the expanded network can deliver Gigabit, 2Gig,10Gig, and 100Gig fiber services to connected businesses and residents.
Andrew Cohill, WideOpen’s CEO, described the company’s current activities. “Our next generation fiber backbone passes by nearly every business and residential area of Blacksburg. We have a complete network expansion roadmap for 2021 and 2022, and we will be connecting homes to our fiber network steadily as we complete new lateral network segments.”
The company is also expanding its network in Montgomery County, and some residents in the Catawba Valley got connected in December and January. Most of those homes were on extremely slow DSL, and they are delighted with the speed of WideOpen’s rural fiber service. Lynn Huber, who coordinates the company’s Blacksburg project, said she has been getting thank you notes from new customers. “They are telling us their children can finally do their school work and participate in virtual classroom activities at the same time as their parents work productively from home.”
WideOpen has been getting service requests from all over Blacksburg and Montgomery County. Potential customers are telling the company they want what WideOpen offers: excellent service, a choice of services and ISPs, connections that don’t drop, and lightning fast uploads and downloads. The WideOpen fiber network has been designed specifically to support homes and businesses that need high performance two way video support for services like Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Webex. Scott Hebdon, a new customer in the Catawba Valley area has been very pleased with the service: “I truly appreciate that the WideOpen team brought Gigabit fiber to us; it has made a tremendous difference to our children and their ability to do their schoolwork.”
Huber described an important feature of the network. “Our network is fully symmetrical, meaning upload and download speeds are the same. When a customer fine tunes their new setup, they are shocked at the difference between their previous old-fashioned, copper-based network with slow upload speeds and WideOpen’s lightning fast wide Gigabit fiber. Batches of photos, large files, and work documents move back and forth to the cloud without affecting any other internet activities.”
WideOpen Blacksburg is a subsidiary of WideOpen Networks, and both companies are based in Blacksburg. WideOpen Networks provides the network back office technical support for the Blacksburg network, but the company also maintains and supports nine other networks in Virginia, Montana, and New Hampshire. The company has a national reputation for network design, construction, and management, and has designed and built modern fiber and wireless networks throughout the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean.
For additional information, contact:
Andrew Cohill
WideOpen Blacksburg (540 ) 961-5411
2000 Kraft Drive, Suite 2200, Blacksburg, VA 24060
www.wideopenblacksburg.net
WideOpen™ is a registered trademark of WideOpen Networks.