Super high speed Internet access at speeds up to 100 times normal broadband capacity will soon be a reality for residents of the Roundhouse Place Apartment Community, thanks to a new fiber optic connection laid by Digital West Networks, Inc.
In 2008 Digital West began deploying an Ethernet fiber optic network that will eventually circle all of San Luis Obispo. Currently, 23 miles of fiber optic network are already in place, providing 75 “lit” commercial buildings with Internet services normally found only in larger metropolitan areas. The Roundhouse Place, a community of 39 market rate apartment homes that are newly open for lease, is its first residential project.
“The fiber has been a real attention getter and a deal sweetener, especially for our tech savvy renters,” said Andrew Fuller, developer with Fuller Apartment Homes and Presidio Capital Partners. “For those who aren’t as familiar with fiber optics, we tell them ‘it’s kind of like the Google Fiber project comes to SLO’ and then they get it.”
Even when businesses upgrade their Local Area Networks to higher speeds, employees face bandwidth bottlenecks for applications outside the Local Area Networks where speeds have traditionally been limited to much slower telecom circuit speeds of T–‐1s, DSL and DS–‐3s. Fiber optics provide speeds up to 100 times faster than a traditional broadband connection, enabling employees, and now residents, to improve their productivity through the use of services like virtualization and video conferencing which improve with high amounts of bandwidth. “Our fiber cable can be used by Digital West customers to connect to their servers or cloud resources, allowing much faster response times, large uploads, streaming, or performing full server backups or restores,” said Tim Williams, Founder and CEO of Digital West. “Fiber optics provides the Earth’s fastest communication technology.”
Digital West’s Metro Fiber program delivers 100 Mbps, GigE and 10 GigE speeds for commercial-grade Internet and Wide Area Network connections. “The big telecom companies don’t believe there is a business case for building extensive fiber optic networks in our community, but we are proving there is,” said Williams. “Our goal is nothing short of delivering fiber optic service to every business in San Luis Obispo.”