by Philip Trubey
OCT 2, 2018
Dozens of people attended the RSF Connect ground breaking ceremony last night at the Golf Club. Representatives from our ISP, Race Communications, our network construction company, HP Communications, and our central office builder, CHPT Construction, were there on hand to give us some remarks and then answer any and all questions while we sipped champagne and ate hors d’oeuvres.
Our central office, rendered to the left, will be the nicest looking telecom building in California! The building pad has already been graded and building construction will start in earnest next week. As it is mostly a small concrete block building, it won’t take too long to complete.
HP Communications has so far finished about 4 miles of conduit route, or about 5% of the project. Their pace will accelerate even more next week as they bring on additional crews. Just a reminder that what they are laying right now is just the conduit. They still have to come back and install underground vaults, and fill the conduit with fiber, and do a bunch of fiber splicing labor.
Our ISP, Race, will start actively marketing to our residents within a couple of weeks. At this stage, they will be reaching out to residents to determine interest. At some point, they will start house site visits to see what needs to be done to prepare for the connection. Some houses will need homeowners to do some work (for instance if they want their own gardeners to trench a new conduit, or they are in the middle of a remodel that will impact where the fiber comes in), while others will want Race to do all the conduit trenching for them, while others might have a quick and easy existing path to the street.
Be aware that we are about 6 months away from the first customers being “lit”. Not only does the central office need to be built, but the fiber network must be built from the central office all the way to the edge of Rancho Santa Fe to hookup with our uplink to the Internet.
Similar to the road construction company, Race will be learning how much work a typical Rancho Santa Fe house needs. For instance, the road construction company was apprehensive about digging in our streets and blocking traffic until they learned that traffic tie ups were minimal. Race too will be learning about our houses and lot sizes.
NEW! I learned that Race will indeed be offering a WiFi set up service to bring high-quality WiFi to your entire house/property. Their carrier class equipment manufacturer they use, Calix, now has a WiFi Mesh product line, and Race will offer an installation service for that. In addition, they hope to be able to provide other Internet-connected services such as the Ring doorbell and Ring security systems.
Finally, note that Race has set up a Rancho Santa Fe portal on their website: