State of the Internet
(Updated January 25, 2021)
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Greetings Mount Dallas homeowners. To quote the Grateful Dead, "what a long, strange trip it's been." When I first started out as the MDA Technology consultant, most of us had either no phone service, or phone service but no Internet service, or phone and 1.5 Mbps Internet access.
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Over the last 7+ years, I have met with many potential Internet providers. All of them came charging in here saying they could provide us with service much better than what we had (which wasn't going to be very hard since most of us had little to nothing at that point.) Sadly, each provider made lots of promises, but ultimately could not provide us with anything that didn't include a large capital outlay.
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Then, last year, CenturyLink and I had a discussion about options that would serve the entire mountain. The engineer told me he had an idea for a hybrid system that would utilize the fiber optic cable that was installed along West Side Road in conjunction with the small amount of fiber that was installed under Mount Dallas Road and terminated on Larkspur Lane. Using some new technology, it would allow a combination of fiber optic cable and the current copper line that our phones use now to deliver speeds of 20-25 Mbps to all users. This was exciting news, and the best part was it would require minimal capital expenditures on our part. And that Mount Dallas would be the very first application of this new technology in the entire state!
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After months of waiting, the new system was finally installed, tested, and opened to property owners of Mount Dallas. From initial reports, most people are seeing an average speed of 20 Mbps, which is enough to stream videos, download applications, and other "new necessities" of life online.
I want to say thank you to all of you for your patience on this. I also want to thank Royce Meyerott for helping me by coordinating the upper Mount Dallas end of things. I hope that we are all binge-watching Netflix and doing our remote work very soon.
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John Boyd
Mount Dallas Technology Consultant