The Pilot is Live!
This week Holland BPW connected Gigabit fiber broadband to three pilot sites. This is a big milestone toward getting broadband for everyone.
ZOMG! I just downloaded a 6GB film from iTunes in fewer than five minutes on #HollandFiber.
— Brian Burch (@brianburch) January 26, 2016
Initial speed tests are looking good; we’re getting 800 Mbps speeds down and 600-700 Mbps up!
As the final few pilot sites come online, speed tests might go down a bit (we’re all sharing 1 Gbps or 1,000 Mbps). But this is 10-100 times faster than what we had before, so it feels extremely fast.
Try it out
How do you try it for yourself? Two of the sites are public: Lemonjello’s and Butch’s.
Both have public Wi-Fi into BPW’s fiber broadband. I recommend starting your day at Lemonjello’s with coffee and a muffin straight from the oven. Then move to Butch’s for soup and sandwich lunch and a microbrew in the pub.
The Wi-FI network names are HBPWHighSpeed5G (best) and HBPWHighSpeed24.
These are 5 GHz & 2.4 GHz networks respectively.
Read our What to Expect tips to get the best speeds from these Wi-Fi network. Per-user speeds may be limited from time to time.
What’s next?
The pilot runs for three months. During that time, we hope to hear about pricing and wider rollout plans from BPW.
How can you help? Tell BPW and City Council you want this soon! Spread the word, and have your friends sign up to show their support.
This is awesome. Keep up the great work everyone!
What special hardware might one need to take full advantage of these speeds? Isn’t there a bottleneck somewhere in most typical hardware?
Robert Good hardware definitely helps. A couple of the pilot sites are limited to under 100 Mbps due to old hardware. They could plug a computer directly into the ethernet port(s) on the fiber gateway, but if you want to get your whole home/office, you may need a new ethernet switch or wireless access point (there are some good ones under $100).
The boxes BPW put in Butch’s and Lemonjello’s have a handful of ethernet ports and fast Wi-Fi built-in. The idea is that BPW could give you a box like this, similar to how your current ISP might give you a wireless router.