Carol Stream is my area and I think we’re building that area next year but don’t quote me on that. We’re currently on our end of the year budget panic that we get the last quarter of every year so no new jobs are being issued. Wheaton and Glen Ellyn are going strong, Elmhurst is in process (eternally it seems), the majority of Lombard is done. Carol Stream has been a black hole for utility companies for a while, not saying it’s the case but when municipalities won’t green light our permits for new builds it’s usually because they haven’t gotten their fair share (aka kickback). It’s not uncommon for the village idiots in charge to want things like free cell phones and service or super high speed service to their houses for free for life, what they don’t understand is their citizens want the service badly and the powerhouses that are utility companies won’t give an inch or bend because they don’t have to. The best way to get fiber to an entire community isn’t by going through the company providing it, it’s by the citizens of that community going to the local government and demanding it. Demanding freebies stops real quick when politicians might lose their jobs if it’s discovered they’re the reason for the holdout.
Google fiber will not happen around here (at least not in my lifetime) and they lost their asses building a fiber network in Kansas City. Projections showed they would’ve most likely bankrupted the entire company had they continued and as far as I know they’ve halted future builds. Putting cable in the ground, making it work correctly and connecting to other networks is insanely expensive and you can’t cut corners in certain aspects because it causes enormous safety issues.
Which leads to MetroNet…….the single largest collection of unsafe and unethical misfit hacks I’ve ever encountered in my life. They give their people little to no training, the most minimal equipment and attempt to hide their mistakes by abandoning jobs and “forget” to mention they bored through gas, water, sewer, power and street lights. When they (their shoddy contractors) make mistakes and take out other utilities they literally pack up and run and the contractors they use suddenly forget how to speak English if you can even find them. Schaumburg got “Metro’d” a few years ago and 1 crew bored through a sewer pipe and then a water pipe and caused raw sewage to leak into the drinking water supply for an entire subdivision and another couple of crews took out ComEd and Nicor in a single road crossing and they took off so fast they left their equipment behind. MetroNet around here uses strictly the lowest bid contractors and they’re nothing more than a 3rd party billing company.
This! This is the high level of quality knowledge that is hugely appreciated. Thank you sir! Any idea how I can find out whom to contact to start prodding them more about giving permits to build out the fiber?
I'm sick of Comcrap and their limited bandwidth. I know they're doing a limited rollout in 2023 with DOCSIS 4.0 to give better speeds (especially upload), but I'd really like to dump them. The only other wired option is AT&T and their U-Verse (DSL), which the max I can get is 45Mbps, which they want $80/mo for. I pay that for my 1.2Gbps/35Mbps package.
When CS was redoing the tertiary power last year the surveyor said there was fiber running right down Country Farm Rd, from the box at Kelly Dr, going down to the Park District building at Lies/County Farm. Said something along the lines of the fiber is there, but CS doesn't want to branch it out to residents. County Farm Rd is about 50-60' from my structure...
If you look at the AT&T Gigapower map Carol Stream is dead smack in the center (a black hole) of the areas that they cover.
My mom is in Wheaton, just southeast of the fairgrounds. For years the residents were asking for something better than DSL or Comcrap, and the village just wouldn't let AT&T run fiber. Guess enough people complained (like you said to do) that they finally starting putting the nodes in. They were all set to wire up her block when the person that owned the property where the box would go didn't want to see it. After a heated battle the city relented and didn't do the install. Pissed off a lot of neighbors. Not sure what happened after that, but as of a few years ago she has fiber available to her. Just need to get her to drop her POTS line and go to VOIP. I can understand her hesitance though. She has two hardwired phones in the house and likes knowing that even in a power outage she'll have a phone for emergencies.
With MetroNet, holy shit that's some insane mistakes. I had no idea the contractors/sub-contractors were THAT bad. My friend in Romeoville has MetroNet, got it when it first rolled out. He has had it a few years and is happier than a pig in moist shit. The jump from comcrap to fiber was a windfall for him, since he is a videographer. Went from 10Mbps upload (the max he could get on cable) to 500/125. They then went synchronous and he's at 500/500 now. Only thing I needed to do for him was replace his old-ass 10-BaseT cables with some CAT6 so he could actually use the 500/500. Uploading his final work takes mere minutes now, instead of hours.
My dad (south of Lexington, KY) had the option for MetroNet, which I really wanted him to get, since the 500/500 package was like $50/mo. The other option was Spectrum, which I begged him not to go with. During the move there he asked the [new] neighbors about the internet options and every single one he asked said that the MetroNet fiber option was pure shit. Absolute garbage, which is in stark contrast to everyone I know that has it. Granted those that I know have had it for a few years now, so maybe the installers were decent back then?
He ended up with Spectrum's 400/20 package, but averages 460/24. Much better than the 1Mbps/256Kbps he was getting at the old house on DSL that was 21,500' from the node