Pictures are worth a thousand words – and this one has a story indeed. Shown in the center is a Mimosa ethernet NID. It’s connected to an outdoor wireless internet CPE used for this customer to get internet. It was part of a recent install where a customer upgraded from unreliable fiber internet to Lightwave XR, an internet product offered by a company I’m invested in and operate called Alabama Lightwave.

Over on the right side of the photo is the customer’s old fiber drop connecting them to the competition’s newly constructed fiber network in this city. The fiber drop has now been cut, and the ethernet cable occupies the path it used to follow into the customer premises. Why would this household drop fiber capable of delivering gigabit internet in favor of a wireless internet option?

Because contrary to what lobbyists and Wall St. fiber operators will tell you – fiber isn’t the be-all-end-all to a customer’s internet experience.

Far more important than the delivery medium are issues such as:

• Is the service consistently online or prone to frequent outages?
• What’s the latency? (Time in milliseconds between the end user and the services they’re interacting with like Netflix or Facebook.)
• Does the provider have redundant connections out of the service area in case of a network backbone disruption?
• Is the internet bill consistent and predictable?
• Is the ISP spying and selling data to advertisers?
• Is the ISP throttling services if a customer utilizes torrents, VPNs, or other counter-censorship technologies?
• Does the ISP limit data usage? (Data caps!)
• Does the ISP fund and support causes that are inconsistent with the customer’s values?

I’ve seen a number of new Alabama Lightwave customers cite service reliability, billing issues, customer support, and local ownership for why they jumped ship and changed providers to Lightwave.

So what’s the story in this photo? Fiber was a broken promise for this customer. Was it fast? Sometimes! Did it go out alot? Yep. Was the customer service good when it did fail? Nope.

At the end of the day most customers don’t want to think about their internet. They want it to just work. And when it doesn’t, they’ll swap to something else, regardless of what the delivery medium is.