Spanish Fork Community Network
Technical Information
SFCN customers:
I have had several requests for more technical information about the SFCN network so I decided to create this technical corner of the web site. This information isn’t necessarily intended to teach about networks and will at times require some knowledge of computer networking but I will keep it as simple as practical.
As an overview, after examining all the options we had to implement a City wide network we settled on and built (and are still building) an HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) network. Simple put, it is fiber to the neighborhood and coax to your house. There will be 50 nodes built in Spanish Fork by the end of August, with new nodes coming online to meet the town’s growth. Each node is about 150 homes total and with a take rate of about 25% it means you are sharing your fiber with approximately 37.5 homes (Hope you don’t live in one of the .5 homes).
We currently service the City with 24 mbps of internet access but have the capability of providing about 70 mbps download and 25 mbps upload across our plant. Your cable modem is currently throttled at 1.5 mbps download and 512 kbps upload and if you don’t see those types of speeds in the middle of the day then you may have a problem. There is almost always lots of bandwidth available during the day and those cable modem limits should be able to be reached consistently (Give or take a couple 100 kbps). During our most busy times (6 pm until 10 pm) your access will slow down, but should still provide high speed internet.
Of course, we really don’t want any slowdown even during the busiest part of the day, so we are expanding. We will be adding both new hardware and bandwidth over the next 30 days. We are tripling our internet bandwidth access (over 75 mbps) and increasing our plant capability to over 100 mbps download and over 40 mbps upload and have no plans for a price increase. We have every intention of offering the BEST internet access value in the State of Utah.
We currently have 6 class C address blocks and use NAT (Network Address Translation) of nonroutable numbers to supplement those addresses. We implemented NAT a few months ago when our internet provider refused my request for additional addresses. As you probably know, IP addresses are rather hard to come by and their refusal forced me to implement NAT (Actually PAT as in Port Address Translation for the people who know the difference).
Our renegotiation of our internet bandwidth purchase has yielded promises of additional IP addresses and we will be able to discontinue NAT in about 60 days. After that time we should have enough routable IP addresses for everyone in the City.
I will expand the pages offered in this tech corner so you can learn more about your network and also use these pages to help keep you informed of changes and possible disruptions of service.
I hope you are enjoying your Spanish Fork Community Network. We are working hard to provide a new and exciting service. We take our responsibility to provide a fast and reliable service very seriously and with your help it has fast become the envy of the State.
John Bowcut
Director
SFCN