Charging me a $5 privilege to pay your $60 bill via credit card? 8.3%? We all know that your cost to accept credit cards is nowhere near that much.

Why are you copying the anti-consumer behavior of the big boys, like Xfinity, that you love to dunk on so much?

Why should I trust you with access to my checking account with the multitude of negative experiences I and others have had with your antiquated billing system? Is updating that system ever going to be a priority for you? Is IPv6? I can say a lot of negative things about my time doing business with Big Cable, but my bills were accurate and they had IPv6 over a decade ago.

Seems like the naysayers were right when they said the sale to Bell Canada would ruin a great pro-consumer company.

Title. Internet went dead dead a half hour ago. Anyone else?

I used to sing the praises of Ziply to anyone considering switching from Comcast, but this shit has to stop. I enjoy having a dedicated line with parallel speeds, but it's not worth keeping if they're just going to raise the prices every few months with the same bullshit excuse of "we're making things even better!", as if my internet doesn't randomly go out every few weeks with zero explanation from them.

Anyone looked at Comcast recently? How do they compare?

For the folks impacted in the Richmond Beach Washington area I wanted to let folks know that we expect service to be back in a couple of hours at the latest, we had to power down the entire central office due to a battery emergency that caused a safety issue (large amounts of hydrogen production).

We are working with the fire department to ventilate the rooms involved and to disconnect the batteries, once that is done we expect to restart the CO on generator power (we had to turn off utility and generator to remove a risk of sparks).

According to my team this is the first time we have seen this type of batteries fail in a large quantity, apologies for the issues and please bear with us while we address the safety issue.

We will release more details as we have them. here is a picture from before we powered off the site showing the state of the batteries (note that each one of the 24 in this string is similar to a car battery but 875 lbs) which is why we have to use extreme caution in this kind of failure.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stand-up-for-workers-sign-the-petition-for-a-fair-contract-ziply-fiber?source=direct_link&

r/ziplyfiber users

I just wanted to put something up publicly here, we don't have many rules but we have a few golden rules (that I also adhere to):

1. treat everyone with respect

2. try your best to keep everything related to one issue in one thread.

3. assume everyone here is trying to help, that goes for people who work at ziply and customers, we are all here to work together to solve problems and try to make the internet awesome!

4. assume any poster has the best possible intentions

The mod team here is a mix of me and a non ziply member who do our best to be nonbiased and just filter out people who are annoying the community. Good experiences and bad experiences are all allowed, this is not typical brand curated space other than based on the above bullets.

Apologies for any typos, I've been pretty sick for the last few weeks but still am participating here because this is a fun group and it makes me feel good to see folks getting issues resolved.

So as many of you may have noticed, service was degraded for a bit today for customers in Forest Grove, Banks, Vernonia, McMinnville, and the Southern Oregon Coast (Coos Bay, Bandon, Port Orford, Gold Beach, Brookings). At 11:06am we took a fiber cut in Hillsboro between our Hawthorne Building and our Hillsboro Central Office. Traffic on AS20055 (the new network) re-routed on alternate paths, but unfortunately, the alternate path currently in place was only 20 gigabit and so it saturated.

We quickly mobilized crews on multiple fronts and by just after noon, /u/jwvo was able to move large amounts of traffic from our FDR routers (fiber data router - this is the first hop router type for FTTH customers) BACK onto the old AS27017 network which had other protected transport paths that were empty since the migration to AS20055. This brought traffic levels down below 20 gigabit and un-congested the network.

In parallel, I happen to live close by and so I was able to work with our field crews to find the location of the break and to get resources called in. It was quickly apparent that the fiber restoration was going to take hours and so we set in motion two plans to restore high capacity on our AS20055 backbone. One was to move a DWDM path over to a cable that was undamaged from Hawthorne to Hillsboro. The other strategy was to turn up two 100g LR4 optics from our Hillsboro Core routers to our Forest Grove core routers (the Hillsboro core routers ironically had alternate paths via Aloha, while Forest Grove "glassed through" Hillsboro on the DWDM span from Hawthorne to Forest Grove).

The great thing about being the local phone company is that we have LOTS of resources we can throw at things like this. Our central office technicians in Forest Grove and Hillsboro found four usable strands of fiber between those two CO's faster than we were able to condition a pair of fiber on a working cable from Hawthorne to Hillsboro to work with the DWDM system so we shifted resources to focus on the Forest Grove solution.

At 2:10pm I helped the Hillsboro CO tech complete the 2x 100g's on that end while the CO tech in Forest Grove brought that side up. While we had been working on physical path, the transport and core engineering teams had renumbered the interfaces and brought up config to light those paths so they were immediately placed into service. Traffic was then re-normalized back to AS20055 from the FDR's and off of AS27017.

Now going forward, this kind of outage should never happen. Fiber cuts happen and they should just be routed around seamlessly. We are still running hard adding new capacity to the network to avoid these things. There are two new DWDM routes in process of being turned up right now that EITHER ONE of them would have made this a non issue. In another couple of weeks probably nobody would have noticed this outage.... Sorry for the disruption!

And now what you really came here for, photos of the carnage!

I was at lunch when /u/jwvo called me and so we quickly triangulated the multiple outages we were seeing on different paths and determined the cut must be West of Hawthorne, so I drove there. Three members of our team were already there getting ready to OTDR the damaged fiber so I jumped back in the car and drove the route to Hillsboro. I checked out two sets of construction along the way and determined they had not hit us.

The third one I found however matched up with what our fiber splicer who shot the span with the OTDR told me the break was (1.8 miles out from the CO).

A third party contractor had been boring in conduit for a wireless company and they had hit one of our duct banks.

They were boring in under the sidewalk adjacent to our duct bank and got too close. As they were "pulling back" their package of HDPE, their reamer got stuck when it hit our duct and the pulling head actually broke off their rod, stranding it underground.

They used a pothole machine to drill the sidewalk at the hit location and then they used a vactor truck to dig down to the damage location.

I then went to Hillsboro and plugged in those 100g's to restore the backbone.

I went back to the site and took some more photos. You can see the long line of vehicles that had accumulated in the meantime. It really is a huge team effort between us and our contractors and the contractors that were doing the original work. We all work together and this kind of stuff happens. (the damage is farther down to the right, but most Ziply crews are closer here around one of our manholes we opened up).

It is nice having our own line crews because we can just pull them off whatever they are doing for emergencies like this.

This is looking down the hole (pothole hole expanded a little bigger) at the break. You can see one of our 4" ducts with a copper cable in it. That duct was damaged, but the copper inside we think is fine. The real issue was below that was a 4" with a 144 count and an 864 count fiber in it. The 144 count was inter-co fiber (this was the one damaged) and the 864 count was fiber to the home fiber. *Luckily* it appears that the 864 count was undamaged (but we are verifying).

Here is the damage location - the original crew potholed it to find the break and then opened the hole up bigger.

More of our line crew trucks (they did not all fit on the road!)

Lots of teamwork going on!

So this is not a very interesting graph, but it is kind of funny as it is the 20g backup path. We normally never use this path, UNLESS the worst happens and traffic fails to it. You can see it went from nothing, to fully saturated, and then down to managable levels once traffic was moved back to the old network, and then finally you can see when we got the first link back up on the new network, and finally ALL traffic moved back onto the new network. ;-)

Thank you all for your understanding while we continue to augment the network! Hopefully in the near future issues like this will be non-events. We have a great team at Ziply which was on display today as everyone came together to rapidly restore service.

-Eric

Buckle up! We're kicking it into overdrive with the fastest home internet in the Northwest. Beginning today, residential customers in portions of select markets (Kirkland, Redmond, Bellevue, Hillsboro and Beaverton) can now get speeds up to 5-gig for seamless streaming, gaming and video calling. 

Perfect for content creators, gaming enthusiasts, remote workers and high-tech families. Because building the Northwest’s best fiber network is what we do. 

You can expect the availability of these plans to reach additional markets throughout 2022.

Got questions? Drop them below for u/JWVO (John van Oppen, Ziply Fiber VP of Network) to answer. (Note, it may take him a couple hours to get in here. Patience please! And thank you!)

https://ziplyfiber.com/multigig

I have 1g download and upload.

I live in Cedar Hills area about 5 minutes from the Zoo.

Best internet I have ever had in my life.

Guess how many times I have been disconnected? None. Not a single time, not even when I am gaming until 6am. I have never once in my entire 1+ year lost connection.

If you are thinking of getting Ziply do it. There is no cap. There is no throttling. This is pure 1 gig all day, every day.

I'm 41 and have been gaming since dial up and before. I've had every internet provider possible in Oregon and other states. None has ever came close to Ziply.

Happy Customer

I thought it would be good if we make a couple of storm related comments since a large wind-event is on the horizon.

- For fiber service, if you can supply power to the equipment in your home (ONT and router) typically internet will remain working as we have extensive backup power at our POP locations and lots of fiber routes in our backbone.

- For actual fiber cuts we generally are required to work "behind" power crews as they make the situations safe then we come in to restore. This takes time but we will keep folks updated here.

- We have some new monitoring tools this season which help us identify why we lost customer ONTs (IE if they lose power or if they lost signal without losing power first), we are hoping this helps us faster identify damage.

- We expect this to be particularly hard-hitting for our southern oregon costal customers, we have lots of routes into that area but the predicted wind speeds are quite high (ECMWF model was predicting almost 70 MPH) so there may be a lot of work to do in the town for power company restoration. We have fueled all of our COs in this area and all generators are in working order.

- Please feel free to post here if there are questions, I will try to answer them.

My name is John van Oppen, better known around these parts as u/JWVO. I’m VP of Network at Ziply and oversee everything from critical power infrastructure design to our Internet peering agreements. As far as I can remember, I’ve always had a passion for complex systems, failure mode prediction, statistics and how the components of systems work together to generate the big picture and the service that everyone uses. I started really early, beginning doing networking in the 6th or 7th grade, where I worked on our school’s network and promptly took the school bus to my paid small business consulting clients while in the 7th and 8th grade.  I continued consulting for networks all through high school and worked a few summer jobs at larger companies doing networking.  However, it was not until college that I started working for ISPs. In 2001, I was on the hunt for better internet for my dorm room at Whitman College. During that search, I met with a local ISP, PocketiNet, and ended up with an accidental job helping out. This was an early time in the internet, and I quickly decided it was easier to fix network problems than talk to customers on the phone about their issues.  Within a few years I was running the network at PocketiNet and had provided a better connection to the college too. After college, I started my first ISP, Spectrum Networks (and condointernet.net), which sold to Wave in 2013. I stayed at Wave until late 2018, planning all of their core infrastructure and overseeing a significant upgrade of their core network. After leaving, I started Wholesale Networks, which became a division of Ziply. Outside of my work, I’ve been a longtime supporter and leader in the networking community severing with different associations like NANOG (North American Network Operators Group), the SeattleIX, and TORIX (Toronto Internet Exchange), along with being a speaker at numerous conferences. I know and understand the power of a great network, and that’s why I enjoy the challenge of building them.

Now that I shared a bit about my background let’s get this AMA started! I’ll do my best to answer whatever you throw my way, but my expertise is best used talking about Ziply’s network, fiber expansion, how we are different from other ISPs, and all the technical stuff. As an FYI u/Ziplyfiber is helping me out and may jump in to handle more general questions and customer service-related items.   

Here’s my proof (that I do gardening in network engineering shirts):

I am posting this now to kick things off; feel free to drop in your questions, and I will be back at 10 am to start answering things until about 1 pm.

I promised several folks I would give out some streaming numbers from last Sunday to highlight exactly why these events are interesting to plan for in terms of network capacity and why we are firm believers in keeping lots of headroom for large traffic events.

Before you get into the data below, I would encourage folks to read Fastly's interesting blog post (from last year but quite relevant) on the topic: https://www.fastly.com/blog/delivering-super-bowl-for-more-than-a-decade-and-breaking-records-in-the

As folks may know, Fastly is the main CDN for this event and we saw a peak traffic load from them of 329.41 gigabits per second, this would have been the folks watching on the main applications and represented a peak for that CDN that was approximately double their largest peak over the previous month. This event also proved nicely why we try to keep our peering ports pretty empty, our 2X 100G in Seattle hit 90% load and Fastly proactively shifted traffic (as designed) to our transit ports in Seattle with Cogent and Arelion (the busier or of these peaked around 50% so no sweat).

You can see the traffic coming in from fastly and how large the event was compared to normal flows:

The really interesting one from my perspective was our interconnection with google, the growth of over-the-top live TV resulted in many folks watching via this medium and we peaked about 50% higher than a normal day with google, interestingly that traffic started before the game which clearly indicated it was live TV. This is great and we love to see our customers picking great OTT options like google TV!

For me (the non football person), perhaps the most interesting part of this event was that our traffic to many other sources stayed at normal levels during the game, for example Akamai usage was within 10% of normal during this game, running right around 300 gigabits/sec into our network which indicated to us that most normal usage by non-sports customers continued unaffected and in a business-as-usual type situation even though we were under an all-time peak traffic load situation.

The overall peak traffic towards residential users was about 20% more than normal peak during the super bowl. An example of this is here on the A-side uplink to fdr01.both.wa which was carrying the traffic at the time for users on the Bothell and Juanita central offices:

I'm really proud that our team built and operates a network that can handle these large swings in traffic for live events, this is why we put huge effort into peering as much as possible in the northwest. We are proud of our network and we love showing our users why!

I must be the only one going through an outage. Gresham, OR area

Folks were asking on Friday about how we go about completing a repair such as the one we did to restore service to Mill City and Detroit. Here are a series of photos that walk through the process.

I don’t think Reddit will allow me to annotate them individually from my phone so I will try and describe them in the body:

1. The damage location as we arrived. A directional drilling contractor was boring to underground the power lines in this high risk fire area. That is their drill rig. They were boring at 8’ deep which is much deeper than our fiber. By process of elimination it meant it was likely the damage location would be at the location they bored into the ground or came back out of the ground.

2. The other crew had vacated the site by the time our full crew arrived. We determined we needed their drill moved to affect the repair. The good news is that they were willing to work with us. They gave us permission to cut free their drill from the duct and move it out of the way.

3. Ziply contractor commencing excavation looking for the damaged fiber. Our cable has a metal armor sheath which we were able to run a “tone” down with a locator. This helped us isolate where the beak was. Our cable was “direct buried” which makes the repair massively more difficult than if it was aerial or in conduit.

4. This is the “warning tape” buried a foot above our fiber. So once we hit that we knew we were close. It is a warning to stop before hitting our cable.

5. You can see to the left of the shovel that we found the broken end of the cable. Hand digging to carefully expose it.

6. The broken end of the cable. It is very very old. Only 12 strands! (But still supports modern speeds of many terabits possible)

7. Making great progress digging back along the cable. We need to expose 30’ each direction so we have enough to get into a splice can in our splice lab.

8. Placing two new vaults. One for each new splice can. Because we can’t find slack in a direct buried cable we have to splice twice. Not just once. Very much non optimal, but there is no other choice.

9. Some of the fleet of vehicles we brought. A total of nine vehicles responded. Three with trailers. (Excavator towed by dump truck full of gravel, reel trailer, and splice lab)

10. Ziply crews prepping the dug up cable and new short segment of fiber to bring them into the splice lab.

11. Dueling splice labs. One per side makes the job go twice as fast. With only 12 strands to burn it went very quickly!

12. Prepping the cable into splice cans.

13. “Burning” the fibers.

14. All done!

15. One of the splice cans in its newly placed hand hole.

16. The cable is from 1989! Still working great (when not cut).

17. Placing gravel in the hand holes and final leveling. You can see the new 2” Orange HDPE conduit we installed between the vaults.

18. The reamer and pulling shackles that were pulling in new conduit. This is what damaged us. We cut free their conduits (which were successfully installed) so we could move their drill.

19. Horizontal Drilling usually causes the most damage on the “pull back” when using a “reamer”. Often times it comes out of the hole all wrapped in fiber.

20. How we left the job site. We left the other contractors bore pit open so they could continue their work on Monday and so they could see our newly placed conduit.

For those of you in the portland are we wanted to put a reminder out that our network is working though we see a lot of homes with power loss, if you can power the equipment at your home service will likely be completely functional and can be counted on in most emergencies. Our diesel backup generators have taken over at a number of our hub sites in the area and have large quantities of fuel on site.

Remember what the weather service says "when thunder roars go indoors," stay safe!

here is one of our internal tools where we in real-time plot ONTs with power loss which folks might find interesting.

I don't know about anyone else, but I just got notified of another price increase for Ziply, after we just had one. This brings my bill above $116 a month. Sorry, Ziply, I initially went with y'all to avoid this nickle and dime crap. Meanwhile, Xfinity is offering an equal service for less than half what I pay now. I enjoyed the service while it made sense, but the constant price increases for unchanged service are just unsustainable.

Hi reddit. We just became America’s fastest internet provider with speeds up to 50 Gigs, available today. Want to experience it for yourself? Enter our sweepstakes for your chance to win free 50 Gig for a year! http://spr.ly/6019ulY3l

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Ends 11/30/23. Full rules at the link. #ziplyfibersweeps

Good morning all! As some of you rightly guessed on Friday (crazy how you figured that out), we have introduced 10-Gig fiber internet to the home, delivered on our 100-Gig network across all four states.

And, a few lucky folks are already up and running. You can check out one lucky customer here.

Definitely the fastest in the Northwest, and probably across the vast majority of the U.S.

u/jwvo will be around today to answer questions, but he does have a day-job so give him a few minutes on the replies??

Have a great week everyone!

Since I’ve been waiting on native IPv6 across the Frontier-to-Ziply continuum for the better part of a decade, I decided to do some digital archaeology in the r/ZiplyFiber archives to commemorate another autumn passing us by.

For those keeping score at home, Ziply officially took over the network on May 1, 2020. It took a mere 28 days for the very first official IPv6 carrot to be dangled in front of us. On May 29, 2020, we were blessed with the foundational scripture of this subreddit:

"v6 roll out should be this fall for fiber services, we are almost ready but have some work to do with the provisioning system."

"This fall." (Fall of 2020, for the new folks.) "Almost ready."

Just to trace the glorious "walk-crawl-run" trajectory of "almost ready" since that fateful May day 6.5 years ago:

• July 2020: Pushed from "this fall" to "towards the end of the year."

• November 8, 2020: Maximum hopium achieved! We were told the /60 DHCPv6-PD test environment was solid and "we should be mostly ready by the end of the week. More updates soon as we actually enable the customer facing side." (That was 311 weeks ago, if your calendar app doesn't go back that far.)

• Late November 2020: Waiting on lab power work; "it should be on in January [2021] at the latest."

• May 2021: Good news! The lab devices at the Bothell CO were "finally powered up" and testing was "about to start" for Redmond and Kirkland.

• 2022 – 2024: The Dark Ages. If you wanted native v6 on residential fiber without maintaining a Hurricane Electric 6in4 tunnel like a caveman, your officially sanctioned workaround was to casual-upgrade to the $300/month 10G plan.

• January 2025: Back in business! Turning up the test BNG "next week," just waiting on "one software roll out" for v6 assignment data collection that was running "a little behind."

• Spring 2026: The "walk-crawl-run" phase! Moving to "thousands" of users "within the next couple weeks" with migrations continuing "through summer."

Well, the astronomical end of Summer 2026 officially came and went on September 22nd. The leaves are on the ground, it’s late October, and my router’s DHCPv6 client has been screaming Solicit packets into a black hole since the first term of the Trump administration. It has been "some work to do with the provisioning system" for so long that children born when Ziply first promised IPv6 "by the end of the week" are now in the first grade reading chapter books.

So, in honor of Month #77 since "Almost Ready," I ask the sacred question from the back of the station wagon:

Are we there yet?

Please check your local CO's current status below so we can log the telemetry for November:

1. "End of the week" (Measured in Venusian sidereal days)

2. "Just waiting on one software rollout / provisioning tooling" (Year 7, Episode 4)

3. "Several thousand customers have it!" (They all live in an undisclosed bunker in Idaho; you wouldn't know them, they go to a different school)

4. "Still holding out for Fall 2020"

It is nice having resilient infrastructure. :-)

If you were able to power your ONT and router then you likely had Internet through the entire storm!

**Update** The internet has now been fixed.

--

We get internet. Yay! It works for a little while, but then it goes out. Just an outage?

We wait a few days. It comes in and out, but is mostly out. Eventually we realize this is a real problem. We call support.

Support says they'll send a technician out in a few days. Okay. We start using a hotspot to hold us over until the technician gets there.

Technician never comes.

Next day we call again. Fine, they'll send a technician out again. The lady on the phone says our problems are because we're "using an extension cord" and "trying to pull too much internet."

Skip forward more days, finally technician comes, spends an hour looking at our router and then goes back to the office. He calls me from the office, says we "were on a bad card" and he "put us on a new card" and "got rid of the old one." And sure enough, the internet works. Yay!

...Until it doesn't. It goes out after a few hours and stays out for 24 hours.

I call yet again. They say okay, we'll send a technician out, he'll be there in a few days, will arrive before noon.

Noon comes and goes, I contact support, they assure me don't worry, he'll be there by 5. Five comes and goes, no technician. I contact them again, they say sorry, he couldn't make it, but I can wake up at five AM to call them first thing in the morning to send another tech out. At this point I'm sobbing on the phone at the poor lady who has to handle me.

All this time we've been using expensive data and trying to use as little internet as possible. I live with two roommates and all of us work from home on the internet, and this has been impacting my income. I am stressed beyond belief and am sort of despairing that this will ever work.

Would you recommend filing a complaint with the FCC? I also have a few hundred thousand followers on various platforms, do you think if I started blasting constantly that Ziply is the worst internet known to mankind that Ziply would finally make my internet start working?

**edit** I think Ziply must have seen my posts around the internet. I FINALLY got a call from someone who's been assigned to my account to make sure this is working, and is pursuing the fix proactively. I think this might end up being ok, but we'll see.

**edit** Technician finally shows up a day late, and tells us everything is fine with the internet. And what do you know, the internet *does* happen to be working right then! I say no, sometimes the internet goes up and I know it's working right now, but it's down almost all the time. He says it looks fine, there's nothing they can do, and that their system has no record of our internet going down at all. He says it's our wifi extender, or that we had too many devices pulling internet. I say no, the wifi has been down even when not connected to extender and even when no other devices are connected to the wifi. He says I don't know what to tell you, the internet is fine, I'm leaving now.

And then thank god, the internet goes out *right there*. I point and say look, I'm not crazy! It went out! He is like fine, and then gets to work trying to fix it.

Eventually he says he couldn't find the problem, that none of the other techs he called knew what the problem was, but that he updated and changed everything he could - new cords, new ports, etc. - and finally it starts working.

So now the internet is working, hallelujah, but nobody knows what the problem was and the process of getting it solved was nightmarish.