2018 has come to a close, and as we do every year we wanted to take a look back at what an incredible year we had last year. Of course our biggest achievement was completing our very first “fiberhood” in Downtown Santa Cruz, bringing Gigabit Fiber to hundreds of homes and businesses, but we’ve done much, much more on top of that. Come join us as we take a look back, and look ahead to 2019.

We Built Gigabit Fiber to Homes and Businesses in Downtown Santa Cruz

After years of development, construction, planning, and perseverance, we were proud to announce this year that our first fiber build in our downtown neighborhood is complete! On August 30th, we lit up our very first all-fiber customer in the El Rio mobile home park. Of course, we immediately ran a speed test and saw unbelievable speeds of 956.20 Mbps for downloading, and 942.49 Mbps for uploading.

Since then, we’ve installed dozens more Fiber users, and introduced them to the same kind of speeds, for only $49.95/month. And we’re just getting started! Over the next few months we’ll be hooking up the rest of the folks in our first “fiberhood.” The first, we hope, of Cruzio’s many Santa Cruz Fiber neighborhood projects. If you’re living or working in downtown Santa Cruz right now, just let us know and we’ll be happy to sign you up as soon as we can!

Our Fiber-Backed Wireless Service, Wireless Pro, Has Expanded Even Further

In addition to our brand new in-the-ground fiber, we’ve also taken great strides in expanding our fiber-backed wireless service, Wireless Pro, to even more areas than ever, especially into areas that were previously well outside of range.

We built three brand new access points in 2018, including one along 41st Avenue that allows us to reach into Capitola for the first time with Wireless Pro. We’ve also built new access points near the Santa Cruz Elk’s Lodge and up at the UCSC Faculty housing up to the north in the Westside. Take a look at the maps above, if you live in any of these areas, let us know, and we’ll be happy to hook you up! And looking towards 2019, we’re planning to ramp up our new new access point construction even further, so keep your eyes open, as we may be coming to your area very soon!

Our Email System Is Safer, Slicker, and Better Than Ever

If you’ve got an @cruzio.com email address (or one of our many other domains like @baymoon.com or @ebold.com, for that matter) you’ve seen a big improvement in our email service this year. We dramatically increased mailbox capacity, the size of emails you can send out, and improved our spam filters exponentially when we switched over to our brand new email server. We even rolled out a brand new webmail client that looks and works better than ever. And best of all, our new email system still upholds our values of never harvesting your information and selling it like most providers would.

It was a massive undertaking all things told. During the upgrade we spoke with and met literally thousands of you all during the upgrade to make sure your email settings were correctly worked out ensure the upgrade was as smooth as possible. So make sure to give a big thank you again to our wonderful staff again for their hard work! And if you’ve still got any questions about your new email, check out our email FAQ, we’ve got answers for you!

We Built Out Free Public WiFi to Watsonville Plaza

Last year, we expanded our Wireless Pro services throughout Watsonville, and as a result this year we were able to bring services to South County like we’ve  never been able to before. That’s why earlier this year, we started a new service to give back to the community. We began our new initiative to bring free WiFi to Watsonville Plaza in downtown Watsonville.

We partnered with The City of Watsonville, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District and the DigitalNEST to build access points throughout the Plaza, so families, students, and really anyone else, can sit in the park and have access to the internet.

Looking Toward 2019

2018 saw one of the biggest additions to our network in Cruzio’s history, with the completion of our Downtown Santa Cruz Fiber network. We’re going to ride that wave into 2019, a year which marks another huge milestone for us: our 30th Anniversary! We’re getting set to hold our biggest Open House Extravaganza ever to celebrate the occasion. We’re also looking to expand to more people than ever, but most importantly we’re going to celebrate tenants Cruzio was initially founded on those 30 years ago:

Do Right By Our Customers.

Do Right By Our Team.

Do Right By Our Community.

We wish you a Happy Holidays, a Happy New Year, and we hope your 2018 was as good as ours, and we wish you  an even better 2019.

Cheers,

Chris, Peggy, Mark, James, another Chris, Sandi, Colin, Adia, Jesus, Alison, Dan, Justin, Andrew, David, Alex, Brooke, Ani, Max, Iasha, Laurie, Alana, Brian, Cameron, another Cameron, Dillon, Jay, and Jason;

Our fantastic apprentices, Spencer and Jessica, and intern, Lidia;

Jake, Annika & Carly (the grown "kids")