Fiber Open House for Chimney Rock Area – Thursday, May 7, 2015 – Nolan Park – from 4 PM till 8 PM.

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Fiber Open House for Chimney Rock Area – Thursday, May 7, 2015 – Nolan Park – from 4 PM till 8 PM.

On April 27, 2015, Posted by , In Customer Service, With Comments Off on Fiber Open House for Chimney Rock Area – Thursday, May 7, 2015 – Nolan Park – from 4 PM till 8 PM.

Direct Communications will be holding a fiber information open house for residents in the chimney Rock area at Nolan Park by the splash pad on Thursday, May 7, 2015 from 4 PM till 8 PM. The company will outline the construction schedule and upgrade plan, and answer any questions one-on-one about how the  fiber will be installed, and how fiber will improve the quality of life for residents living in the neighborhoods to be upgraded. All are welcome, although  this open house is specifically for residents of the the Windhover, Cold Springs, Sundance, Crittenden Corner, Red Rock Ranch, Rockwell Village, and Castle Rock neighborhoods.

Open House will be by the splash pad at Nolan Park.

The open house will be a casual setting where residents will be able to ask questions and visit one-on-one with the Direct Communications General Manager, Operations Manager, Fiber Network Manager and Customer Service Manager. Residents are welcome to stop by our tent anytime from 4pm till 8pm. There will be displays outlining the construction plan, a typical fiber installation to each home, and the fiber electronics which will be placed in each subscribing home. We will also provide materials and tips on how to prepare to fully utilize the fiber connection to your home, like home-networking best practices and recommendations for routers, etc. You will also be able to pre-register for fiber service.

Stop by and get answers to all your questions about fiber, plus enter to win a Smart TV, which we will be giving away to one lucky visitor to the open house.

MORE ABOUT THE FIBER UPGRADE PROJECT:

The Chimney Rock network area around Nolan Park will become the next Fiberhood in Eagle Mountain, where older copper connections will be upgraded to new Fiber to the Home, bringing faster speeds and more reliable Internet service for residents in the Windhover, Cold Springs, Sundance, Crittenden Corner, Red Rock Ranch, Rockwell Village, and Castle Rock neighborhoods. The fiber construction project will begin in April 2015 and is planned for completion by the end of December 2015.

Cody Bailey, Inside Plant Manager For Direct Communications, explained that there will be two phases to this fiber upgrade project: in-house construction by Directcom crews, and a contracted piece, where construction will be completed by outside contractors. “The in-house work will take place in neighborhoods that have existing duct or conduit, and Direct Communications crews will be placing handholes, blowing in the fiber, and splicing the fiber. The contracted work will mainly consist of underground boring in all the older neighborhoods where there is no existing conduit, and the developers just laid copper lines straight into the trenches.”

Bailey explained that generally yards and gardens will not be disturbed, except where existing telephone pedestals are located at the corner of property lots– these pedestals will be replaced with handholes, which will be buried and placed level to the ground, which the company hoped would be welcomed by homeowners, since having no visible equipment would enhance curb appeal of the neighborhood. Most yards do have existing conduit from the old copper pedestals to the home NID, so we should be able to pull the copper out of that conduit and replace it with new fiber without disturbing the yards or lawns.

Kip Wilson General Manager for Direct Communications in Eagle Mountain said the Chimney Rock area was chosen because the existing copper laid by the original property developers was in the most dire need of an upgrade, and causing the most problems for both customers and the network techs. “We understand all customers still on copper Eagle mountain can probably think of good reasons why their neighborhood should be upgraded next, but this area made sense from our network management perspective, because it was some of the oldest copper plant in our network area, and extremely expensive to maintain and rehabilitate. Due to the poor state of the copper, the speeds we offered here were limited to 14 Mb in some neighborhoods, so we really wanted to be able to give our customers here access to higher speeds. We also have to look at population density, and where we can provide the greatest benefit to the most people with the limited funding that we have available to us each year. As we upgrade this neighborhood to fiber, it will provide a springboard to take fiber to some of the areas, and also improve the copper network in other areas.

Wilson was reluctant to publish a final cost of this fiber upgrade project. “In the past we have generally invested about half of our annual $1.5 million capital investment construction budget into fiber upgrades each year, and we expect this project will put us some way beyond that for this year. This will be our first attempt at completing the upgrade of such a large subdivision all within a single year. We have also generally done it in smaller bites, and completed all of the work in-house, and this time we’re going to be bringing in subcontractors to speed up the upgrade process, so this is kind of an experiment for us. We hope the construction project will stay on budget so that we can make this accelerated model work in another subdivisions that still need to be upgraded to fiber.

Chimney Rock Network area map--soon to change from green (copper) to orange (fiber.)

Chimney Rock Network area map–soon to change from green (copper) to orange (fiber.)

In Jan 2015, Direct Communications announced that new 1 Gigabit speeds are available to customers with fiber to the home, and all residents of Chimney Rock who want fiber will have those speeds available to them by the end of the year. The company is currently accepting pre-orders for fiber service for residents of Chimney Rock, which will expedite the upgrade process, because techs will be able to hook up customers who pre-order as they are placing equipment at the home.

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