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Adaptive Fiber LLC is Colorado based family and locally owned business. Initially operating as Adaptive Internet in Delta and Mesa Counties of Western Colorado, we have grown to where we now operate both wireless internet networks and fiber networks in Colorado.
When we moved our family to Western Colorado and bought our home in 2012, we contacted all the available internet providers in the area and none of them could provide our home with internet service. The only option available for our home which was satellite internet which as many of you know is completely unacceptable, slow and has terrible data limits.
We started on this journey in late 2012. It took us over 1 1/2 years to figure out how to bring fiber optic quality high volume wholesale internet bandwidth into the valley. None of the current phone or other service providers in the area had the capabilities to provide what was needed.
This was a huge problem as I worked out of the home doing software development and consulting and I had to have good reliable internet without limits. My background is with computer software, firmware, electronics, networking, and communications, so I understood the technologies involved. There was no technical reason why Western Colorado residents couldn’t have good internet service to their homes. As a family, we decided we had to do something to fix this and so we investigated what it would take to bring real high speed internet bandwidth to Delta County residents with the latest technologies that are available.
We started on this journey in late 2012. It took us over 1 1/2 years to figure out how to bring fiber optic quality high volume wholesale internet bandwidth into the valley. None of the current phone or other service providers in the area had the capabilities to provide what was needed.
Starting from a direct single licensed microwave link to feed our network, we have grown to now our network is fed by multiple independent multi-gigabit fiber feeds to our data center located in Grand Junction Colorado. From there we have built our own towers, our own multi-10 Gigabit over 95-mile-long network that we own and operate. This network exclusively carries our customers network traffic, and it is independent of other carriers. This allows us to now offer up to 10 Gbps services to customers with extremely low latencies. We have also grown to 2 companies, one focused on rural wireless internet and the other on fiber speed connections to both residential and business customers.
Everything has not been completely smooth, and we have certainly run into our share of problems and challenges. However, we are committed to providing the best internet service at the most reasonable prices possible.
When we started this adventure, before our first customers, we wrote down our philosophy of how to provide good quality internet services at a reasonable price to homes and businesses. We have used this philosophy as a guide as we have worked to grow and expand the business.
Our Prices
When we started this adventure, we took time to survey what the pricing structure was for internet service providers in 4 large cities. Those cities were Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. We knew what the pricing was for the local Western Colorado providers, but we considered the pricing to be high and the bandwidth provided to be low. After doing this review, what we found is that the prices for wireless internet were much lower in these 4 cities than what was currently being charged in Western Colorado.
We felt very strongly that eventually there would be more competition in the future from other providers. Why then should any internet service provider charge higher than normal pricing when in the future we would have to lower those prices to stay competitive with new competition.
Instead, we took the pricing from these 4 cities, and we created a spreadsheet that provided us with an average of what was being charged. These averages are what our pricing was based on. We wanted a business that would provide internet and phone service to our customers over the long term, not just for a few years. We felt that if these companies that operated in the large cities could operate a profitable business with the lower prices, then we should be able to operate profitably with the lower prices as well.
The one big difference between providing internet service in Western Colorado vs the larger cities is the cost to us to have dedicated wholesale internet bandwidth to feed our network. In the larger cities, the cost of that bandwidth to the internet service providers is lower. However, we felt that would come down over time here as well and if we were successful with adding more customers that our costs would come closer to parity over time. This plan has proven itself and since starting operation, we have never raised our prices.
We are committed to being one of the most affordable internet service providers. However, to do that, we need to keep our expenses and overhead low and we need to operate very efficiently, otherwise we would have to raise our prices as well. That is why we decided that we were not going to try to compete with some of the larger companies that provide 24/7 phone and technical support, free on-site support, and other expensive overhead killing activities that some larger companies do.
Instead, we promise to give each of our customers the best pricing we can, for both internet, phone and other services, while keeping our overhead low. This of course means that we probably will never have 24/7 support for free or free on-site on-call support or even having someone on the weekends answering phones. However, when we talk to most of our customers, they would much rather have the best price possible with great internet service, knowing that they will not be able to call us after hours or on weekends and get a live person answering the phones during those times.
Why doesn’t Adaptive Internet not have a 1yr, 2yr, 3yr, etc. contract with new residential and standard business customers?
Quite simply as consumers ourselves, we hate contracts. We believe that a company should earn the right to provide a service and you shouldn’t be locked into something from the beginning that you don’t even know if it is going to work properly or not.
Many companies use contracts to lock you in so that you can’t leave to their competition. They also lock you in so you can’t leave when their service is poor. You also can’t get out of the contract even if you end up moving, leaving a large bill to pay if you move. We think that is completely wrong.
We do not play those games. Quite simply you can fire us as a service provider any time you want. If for some reason you are unhappy with our service or simply don’t want it anymore, you can cancel at any time with no penalty or additional charges.
The famous “Up to ?? Mbps Clause”
All internet service providers provide internet plans based on a specific speed, usually specified in “Megabits per second -Mbps). Adaptive Internet is no different. We have different speed plans available for both residential and standard business customers. In addition, all internet service providers, including us, also specify those plans as “Up to xxMbps”. Meaning that you are subscribing to a plan based on a speed and the companies are telling you that your speeds will be up to that speed.
However, this is where the difference comes in with our service. A lot of Internet Service Providers are only actually providing a small percentage of the plan’s speeds to their customers.
We set the speeds when install so that they will peak out at the plan speed selected. As an example, let’s use a plan speed of 25Mbps as an example. We make sure that coming from our radio at your location to your router you will see peaks of 25Mbps. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will always get 25Mbps, there will always be some variation due to weather, atmospheric conditions, interference, Heavy usage times, etc. However, when you run a proper speed test (Please see our Technical Support page for how to properly run a speed test), you should see between 70 to 100% of that speed on a normal basis, with most of your speed test running above that average.
What this means for our 25Mbps plan is that you should see speeds ranging from 18 to 25Mbps with most of the time operating in the 22 to 25Mbps range. In general, your speeds should not consistently fall below 70% of your plan speed and furthermore you should normally see 90% or better of your plan speed 90% of the time. This 90% rule is true on our networks for both Wireless and Fiber internet connections.
For our fiber speed customers, there is even variation on these types of connections. Not all “Gigabit” devices are created equal. As an example, a 1 Gbps fiber connection will also vary. First, a lot of consumer “Gigabit” enabled routers, computers, switches, and devices have “Gigabit” Ethernet ports, but they are not actually capable of supporting a full gigabit network speed. We have seen a lot of devices that are limited to 100 Mbps, 350 Mbps or just over 500 Mbps. Even better devices are limited to around 900 Mbps. All these devices advertised a “Gigabit” Ethernet port, and they will show a “Gigabit” connection on a network switch, however, their internal processing capabilities were much lower. In addition to this, a “Gigabit” fiber circuit has network overhead associated with transferring data. Even a fully compatible “Gigabit” computer or router will still many times only show a speed test of between 900 Mbps and 930 Mbps because of this fiber gigabit network overhead. This is to be expected on these types of circuits.
Phone / Customer Support:
Adaptive Internet has someone answering the phone from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday. There is usually a break in the middle of the day for lunch. Our phone system provides an automated attendant that provides the option to directly dial an extension or to go to Customer Support. We only have at most a couple of people answering phones during these times. That goes along with our company’s philosophy of keeping our expenses low.
If you call and someone doesn’t answer the phone during these times, then you will be given the opportunity to leave a message. This will happen if the person answering the phones is on the phone with another one of our customers. Please leave one message, as all calls to our office number are tracked, logged and we do return calls as soon as the person answering phones is able to call back.
Technical Support:
We do not have a dedicated Technical Support person available at the office for just answering technical questions. Again, in keeping with our philosophy of keeping our expenses and overhead low, all technical questions need to first go to our customer support person answering the phones and they will get the technical questions to the appropriate person so they can call each customer back as soon as possible. Our Technical Support individuals are also involved in tower work, customer installs, network support and other activities. We try to return all calls with technical questions within 1 business day when possible.
