What exactly is AirFiber Wireless internet, I have never hear of that before?
Glad you asked. Well it basically is what the name says, Air Fiber Wireless. We have built this network literally from the ground up…..up….up….our highest tower is 400′ tall and takes a good 30 minutes to climb to the top. We start of course on the ground with a 2 strand of glass fiber thinner that the few hairs left on my head that runs miles back to the NOC (that is layman’s terms for Network Operations Center), where it is connected to other fibers that are connected to the world wide web. We transmit on one and receive on the other. So when you type on the keyboard you are transmitting, when you are binge watching your favorite series on Netflix you are receiving, at least from the fibers point of view. There is so much more involved, a lot of 1’s and 0’s, (unless you are going to a Quantum Computer, then it is just mathematical voodoo) and other mathematical magic that makes it all work.
So each fiber is located in one of our Hubs on what we call our core Node. This node is connected to the brains of our network a robust router and firewall that keeps the bad guys out. It then exits this into a switch where it then goes by a super fast 10 Gig Ethernet cable or fiber to the radio on the tower. From the tower it gets broadcasted out to a small antenna we install on your home. From there back in through a super fast 10 Gig Ethernet cable into a power supply and then on to your wireless router. All faster that you can even think about blinking your eye (which is 100 milliseconds in case you were wondering). Our average Ping time, which is the round trip time out to the internet and back is 8 to 35 milliseconds on average. Thus the name AirFiber Wireless. Internet so fast you won’t know the difference.
LCI has been hard at work over the last 4 years transforming from a traditional satellite internet company to a full service internet service provider. In a nutshell, we can install some form of internet for you, well in most cases. If you live in an underground bunker in this new crazy world, as long as we can get a cable down to you and we can get a signal up top, you got internet.
We have built a significant network of towers and rooftop repeater sites that can virtually cover all of Mecklenburg County and beyond. We can drop a small HAM radio type tower into any community and deliver this same AirFiber Wireless service virtually anywhere here in lake county. This model has been perfected by us and just works.
How fast is your service? This is really a loaded question. Most folks really don’t care what the speed is as long as what they want to do works. Can I game? 24/7 but I think your eyeballs won’t let you. Can I stream? Yep, go ahead and binge watch your favorite shows, while your gaming, and live streaming what you are doing on another device. The sales industry is on “speed”. Our service is 1 Gbps they shout, you can do this and that, blah, blah, blah. I have sat and watched our customers use tons of devices simultaneously on our network monitor and guess what, the maximum velocity any of them were using across the entire household was less than 50 Mbps.
So with this real world, real time customer data, we have decided that going forward our new plans of service will be up to 50 Mbps. Psst, don’t tell anyone, we can go up to 200 plus Mbps and some places faster. But the customer traffic does not warrant any faster speeds. On average we are seeing about 150 Mbps of traffic coming across each tower from all the customers combined. So all the hype about the speed, it is just that hype. Anything over 25 Mbps is considered fast enough by the FCC to be classified as broadband.
Current customers at some locations now have the option to upgrade to the higher speed (no hype here) if you want at the current rate of $85/month. Later this year we will be moving to the new plan and price for everyone as our costs to operate and keep up with technology continues to grow.