Our home’s fiber has gone dark, and we are back on coax. When our house was built in 1981, it was connected to Southwestern Bell Telephone with twisted pair cable and also had analog television service via coaxial cable. As soon as fiber optic cable was available in our neighborhood in June 2022, I had that installed. Given that it was a new utility, I was patient with frequent outages, but after over 30 service disruptions across 33 months, I canceled it.

I bought our house in 1994, when my internet service was on the twisted pair telephone cable using a 14.4 kilobit per second modem. That was 48 times faster than my first 300 baud modem in 1982, but I was glad to jump up to a 56k modem a few years later. In 2001, my bandwidth increased by a factor of 18 when I subscribed to the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service from AT&T, which still ran on the twisted pair telephone wires.

The coaxial cable back then just carried analog television service, but by 2005 it was offering cable modems with five times the bandwidth of DSL, so I switched. In 2008 I ditched the cable television service, but I still relied on the coaxial cable for internet. Over the next fifteen years it gradually evolved from 5 megabits per second to 200 megabits per second as Donrey Cablevision became Cable One and then Sparklight. By 2017, it was offering 1 gigabit per second download service, but that was too pricey for me.

In June 2022, Bluepeak became available in our neighborhood, and I had them install a fiber optic line with symmetrical 1 gigabit per second service for both downloads and uploads. That was almost 70,000 times faster than my telephone modem in 1994 and 200 times faster than my cable modem in 2005. Even better, it only cost $60 per month.

The competitive pressure prompted the cable company to offer me 1 gigabit per second download service for only 2/3 of what it had been charging me for 200 megabits per second service. However, in April 2024, Sparklight was still charging me $94 per month for 1 Gbps download and 50 Mbps upload service compared to $60 per month for symmetrical 1 Gbps download/upload service from Bluepeak over fiber.

I delayed giving up the cable modem since Bluepeak’s fiber service went down much more frequently. It notified me of a whopping 17 service outages between March and October 2023, and there were some before that which didn’t generate texts. However, it followed that dismal performance with only one disruption over six months, so I finally terminated my cable service in April 2024.

Three months later, I had long outages on consecutive days. That irritated me enough, given the home automation that Wendy and I had grown accustomed to, that I drove over to Sparklight’s office to see what they were now willing to offer. Just like AT&T, cable companies won’t advertise their better offerings to existing customers, waiting for you to inquire or threaten them with cancellation to offer better deals.

Competition is important in free enterprise, and my account had been suspended long enough that Sparklight offered me their 1 Gbps download/50 Mbps upload plan at $39 per month for six months, with that then rising to $49 per month, or about half what they had been charging me a few months earlier. In addition to the cable modem, they were willing to provide the same eero router that Bluepeak had provided. That was again considerably better than anything they had previously offered. Unlike Bluepeak, Sparklight did not include an eero mesh network extender unit, but Meador Manor isn’t large enough to need that anyway.

I programmed Bluepeak’s and Sparklight’s eero routers to act as backups for each other. So when Bluepeak went down, Sparklight would take over automatically, and vice versa. That was welcome, as Bluepeak went down three times in August 2024 and reported disruptions in October and November. Over the same period, I only noticed one cable outage, but Bluepeak was always far more communicative about outages than the cable company.

The Bluepeak fiber service cost recently increased from $60 per month to $65. So by March 2025 it was costing 33% more than the cable modem with the same download bandwidth. Running both of the 1 Gbps services was costing me $114 per month, which was about what 200 Mbps cable modem service had cost me from 2019 to 2022.

My frustration with Bluepeak spiked in March 2025 when their little optical network terminal box, which converted the optical signals into electrical ones for the eero router, died. They sent two friendly technicians out who replaced the box, but about an hour after they left it stopped working.

The “Optical” light on the box was blinking red, indicating it couldn’t get a signal. I checked the cables and restarted it multiple times, and it would work for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but eventually it always failed. The eero always switched over to the Sparklight cable backup, but my patience was exhausted.

I called Bluepeak, talked to a friendly representative, and canceled the service. I used their website to print off a return mailing label, boxed up all of their equipment, and sent it off at the post office to their nearest office in Stillwater.

So we’re back to relying on the 1981 coaxial cable for our home internet service. When our cable modem goes down, Wendy and I will have to use our iPhones as cellular hotspots, and our home automation will fail. Our upload bandwidth is less, but that is something we’ll seldom notice. At least now I’ll only be spending $49 per month for our home internet service instead of $114. We might eventually have cause to light the fiber optic cable back up, but for now we’re content to be back on coax.

OCTOBER 2025 UPDATE:

In September 2025 although our billing did not change, still showing us as having 1 Gbps service for $49/month, the download speed plummeted to less than 100 Mbps. Then Sparklight sent me an email, saying I could get 1 Gbps for only $65/month! They are clearly screwing around again, so I’ll go by their office to inquire what is going on.