More Fiber Optic Cable Installed in WV Towns

If you live in the towns of Charleston and South Charleston, West Virginia you may be getting faster high speed Internet in your neighborhood soon.

Alpha Technologies will be upgrading parts of Charleston and South Charleston WV and residents should see higher speeds in their internet service and data services as soon as November. For some it might take until next year.

Hurricane-based Alpha Technologies, a West Virginia business technology company, is installing 35-mile of fiber-optic cable to increase Internet speed up 1 GBps in the two cities.

“Some folks are going to be turned on before Thanksgiving,” said Alpha Technologies, director of special project, Charlie Dennie. “We’re probably about six months away from completing the project.”

It won't only be Internet traffic that travels through the new fiber optic installation although internet service providers will be leasing some of the network capacity. As a matter of fact, Alpha doesn't deal in retail Internet to homes. They provide business fiber connections.

For the installation of the fiber, Alpha Tech opted to dig small trenches to bury the cable. Trying to get permission to use the utility poles already in existence can be troublesome and take months or even a year or two because some pole owners try to slow down competition. The trenches are generally a foot to a foot and a half deep using what they call microtrenching. Horizontal directional drilling will also be used. They plan to complete the project by early next year.

Some of the business customers have already requested a 10 gigabyte connection.

The Evolution of Cable and Internet Providers

Cable television has been around for several decades now. At first cable companies just delivered movie and television stations but then they found out they could connect people to Internet and then phones and the triple play bundle was born. People could get phone, Internet and cable TV in a bundle all from the same provider. Then the telephone companies started doing the same thing and the two industries kind of merged with all of them providing bundles with Internet, Video and voice on one bill.Most people can find high speed cable Internet wherever they live.

Then they started getting even bigger. Comcast Cable bought NBC and Universal Studios. AT&T bought DirecTV. Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo.

With Charter's purchase of competing cable companies Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks last year some may have thought there would be a mass consolidation of cable and other companies. Especially with the election of President Trump. It really hasn't happened. Yet. Altice bought Suddenlink and Cablevision and is still looking to grow and there was some talk of Charter and Comcast engaging in some sort of hookup but it hasn't happened. They did agree not to move forward in starting a mobile phone company for a bit without telling each other.

There was also talk of Charter buying Sprint or Sprint's owner, SoftBank, buying Charter but now it is looking like T-Mobile and Sprint will be merging soon and the Charter/Sprint hookup is off the table.