Orange County September Updates

Customer Activations

Our customer activations are making progress, although slower than we would like. In August we installed service in homes in Efland and Hillsborough. In September we will be working along Efland – Cedar Grove Rd and Carr Store Rd, as well as the Little River Church Rd area where it meets Dawn Dr. and Birdsong Ln. If you live in these areas and are on our waiting list, expect to get a call from our installation team in September.

As we work along Efland – Cedar Grove Rd we will be targeting the west side of the Lake Orange community, starting with Blue Jay Way and Bellechase Rd. and working our way south. Quite a few residents on Lakeview Dr, Lattimore Dr., and Ausling Way are on the waitlist. Our goal is to punch through the woods on the western side to reach these streets, either directly, or via a “hub” home as described below. We may have to install different radios to get through the trees, but once done we will test signal to these streets and schedule service activations shortly thereafter.

Network Growth and Hub sites

The dense tree cover in the county, as well as relatively low tower height,  has limited the service range we are getting from our main towers. In other counties in North Carolina, we can serve customers up to 5-miles away, but we are getting much shorter distances in Orange County. Given these conditions, we are now deploying hub sites, closer to neighborhoods, where we install more antennas using a variety of frequencies to repeat the signal. The Cedar Grove United Methodist Church and the Cedar Grove Ruritan Club are two hub sites coming online in September.

Another approach we are using to expand coverage is utilizing a neighborhood home that can serve as a hub for others. We implemented a hub home in Poplar Ridge and will be doing the same in the Little River Church Rd area in September. Unfortunately securing hub sites is a time-consuming process, thereby slowing down our house to house deployments.

Meanwhile the new tower location using the Hillsborough Water Tank at 1120 Old Cedar Grove Rd is also scheduled to turn up in September. Once it is fully implemented, tested, and accepted, we will be begin scheduling installations in that area as early as the first two weeks of October.

You will be contacted once service is available

Once service is available at your address, we will contact you to schedule an in-home installation appointment. A team of installers will set up the system, attaching an antenna to the exterior of your house in addition to an interior gateway device.

If we have not contacted you that means service is not available yet. Please be patient and we will contact you when we can schedule your address. We will provide as much advance notice as possible.

If your neighbors have not joined the waitlist, encourage them to do so here.