Raise your hand if you’re unsatisfied with your internet service. Yes, mine’s raised too, unfortunately - we don’t exactly get to pick between a bunch of wonderful internet service providers (ISPs) here in Louisville. Maybe you’ve heard of Google Fiber and are insanely jealous of the lucky cities that get a shot at internet speeds up to 100 times faster than your home connection and want to figure out how to get a piece of the action. If so (and if you pay for internet access you should be interested!) head on over to
Louisville Fiber
and let them know!
Louisville Fiber is a group of businesses, internet users and academics that are trying to get as much support as possible so ISPs will want to invest in Louisville. It’s really expensive to set up a residential fiber network in a city, and in order to give ISPs enough incentive, Louisville residents have to show they’re interested.
If you go to the site, you’ll see an area to put in your street address and zip code - this will add you to a heat map of Louisville that shows where the interest lies - the quicker it turns red the quicker ISPs are going to want to invest!
Not sure if fiber internet would make that much of a difference? If you’re like most internet users, you probably stream video. Ever get annoyed when it pauses after a few seconds and you’re stuck looking at an awkward expression on someone’s face while your connection plays catch-up? With fiber internet that would be a thing of the past. New iTunes download taking too long? Fiber would download the average album in about sixteen seconds. These speeds are based on a
50Mb connection
- that’s not even near the maximum speed that fiber would provide.
Head on over to Louisville Fiber and put your address in - even if you don’t end up purchasing the service, you’ve still given more options to your neighbors. And if we bring in a service that is so much faster than the others in town, maybe it would force them to compete for our service a bit.