Reid, In our hurry to bring the service to your area, I have tried to move forward with connecting homes but I know I have your sign up and I will put you down as a tester. The tester program has mostly run its course but having some users feedback is still helpful. Thanks for your patience! John Bowcut Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

I did the same ping to my core router, 10 pings every 30 seconds, yesterday and last night and I didn't drop a single packet. John Bowcut Salem Fiber

I sent 18,570 pings in sets of 10 pings every 30 seconds yesterday and last night to 67.199.171.241 which is the first router outside of our network. So our core router has a 200 gigabit connection to that router. It had 0% packet loss but did drop packets twice in the 1857 batches of pings. The drops were not at heavy load times ( 3:06 PM and 3:32 AM) and every other batch was flawless. Packet loss is inherent in an IP network and shouldn't cause significant service disruption at a 0% rate. I will try the same set of pings to my core router today. John Bowcut Salem Fiber

Test results from last night: I did record an increase of latency around 6 PM last night but the increase was clearly being caused at Google’s router. My system and Cogent, our provider, were flawless. Pings increased from about 40 ms to google dns 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to a high average of 57 ms. The ping times were still well with acceptable ranges. This is what a traceroute showed at 4 PM and at 8 PM but I have the data for every 30 seconds from 2 PM until the next morning: Sun 26 Nov 2023 04:00:47 PM MST traceroute to 8.8.4.4 (8.8.4.4), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 _gateway (128.254.148.1) 1.445 ms 1.377 ms 1.350 ms 2 67.199.171.241 (67.199.171.241) 1.119 ms 3 * 4 be3110.ccr22.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.141) 18.154 ms 18.131 ms 18.109 ms 5 be3179.ccr22.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.43.150) 19.203 ms 19.182 ms 19.159 ms 6 be3177.ccr42.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.145) 31.251 ms 31.306 ms 31.099 ms 7 be3359.ccr41.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.70) 31.055 ms 31.216 ms 31.150 ms 8 tata.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.11.194) 30.935 ms 30.831 ms 30.759 ms 9 * 10 142.250.164.40 (142.250.164.40) 41.429 ms 42.396 ms 41.336 ms 11 * 12 dns.google (8.8.4.4) 40.548 ms 40.520 ms 40.850 ms Sun 26 Nov 2023 08:00:05 PM MST traceroute to 8.8.4.4 (8.8.4.4), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 _gateway (128.254.148.1) 1.408 ms 1.334 ms 1.489 ms 2 67.199.171.241 (67.199.171.241) 1.251 ms 3 * 4 be3110.ccr22.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.44.141) 18.119 ms 18.166 ms 18.070 ms 5 be3179.ccr22.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.43.150) 19.353 ms 19.332 ms 19.309 ms 6 be3177.ccr42.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.145) 30.989 ms 31.266 ms 31.216 ms 7 be3359.ccr41.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.70) 31.428 ms 31.398 ms 31.384 ms 8 tata.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.11.194) 34.484 ms 30.943 ms 30.875 ms 9 * 10 142.250.164.40 (142.250.164.40) 57.770 ms 58.791 ms 57.842 ms 11 * 12 dns.google (8.8.4.4) 56.354 ms 57.645 ms 57.161 ms Notice the times were about the same on my router and through Cogent but increased when it hit 142.250.164.40 which according to ARIN is a Google address range. There was the occasional packet loss but didn’t appear to be significant. Loss is normal and was about what I would expect and was not likely caused in our network but I will test that further tonight. It doesn’t look like anything should have been having a significant impact on performance and our network was flawless. Are you seeing an actual performance decrease? I will do further testing and post the results. If anyone is interested in getting all the raw data just email me and I will send it. johnb@salemcity.org (assuming you are a Salem Fiber customer) Thanks, John Bowcut Director Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

I will do some testing but nothing on our end should cause the issue and I haven't been seeing the same performance issues. We would have to be saturating our bandwidth and we aren't even close. I will post again after my testing. John Bowcut Director Salem Fiber

We are working on it but we still aren't quite ready. You should receive a forum post notification when we are ready to connect testers.

I have updated the Progress! page but there isn't a lot to report. We have been concentrating on getting as much conduit underground installed that we can while the ground isn't frozen. I know it looks like we have slowed down but we have actually increased our crews and are still working as hard as possible to light up the rest of the town.

Well they have stopped only because I have been so busy I haven't had a chance to update it. :) I will try to get done this week. John Bowcut Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

I'm not sure which node you are referencing but we continue to make progress and we are actively installing conduit along the streets and installing fiber. We are coming and it is an amazing network! John Bowcut Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

We need to install conduit on both sides of the street on both 360 E and 320 E. The parts of NE Center where we have customers are serviced overhead on poles and no conduit needed to be installed. We are trying to complete all the conduit installation this year but it will be Fall before the service can be available and that assumes things go well. I know it is frustrating but we are going as fast as we can and we are coming! It is an amazing network and I wish we were everywhere already but it takes time. John Bowcut Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

You can review the "Pick Your Router" webpage: https://www.fiber.salemcity.org/pick-your-router You will quickly discover I don't list acceptable makes and models. Just about any Ethernet WIFI router will work and you can spend a lot or a little. I hesitate to list makes and models because if someone has problems they blame me and want me to fix their problems. I will say that I purchased a TP-Link DECO for my house and I am very happy with it but your experience may vary. It was a MESH system but I ended up only using one of the three routers. If you can locate your router centrally in your house you can often get sufficient coverage. The newest WIFI 6E Quad-Band routers are great but they will cost you one of those arms and a leg. I hope that helps! John Bowcut Salem Fiber 385-437-4411

We are actively working in the area. It looks like we are going to light it up from west to east, so the west part will get the service first but we coming soon! Watch for a forum post when I am looking for testers! We would appreciate the help!

This was such a great question I decided to add a couple web pages to go a little more in-depth about the issues. You can access the new pages at: https://www.fiber.salemcity.org/internet-security https://www.fiber.salemcity.org/parental-control Additionally, we don’t provide any antivirus scanning capability. Most devices come with excellent antivirus programs and that type of protection is best handled at each device. I have found the antivirus software that comes with Microsoft Windows (Windows Defender) to be adequate and far less intrusive on the performance of the computer than any of the applications you can purchase. John Bowcut Salem Fiber

That is an excellent question. The best method is to call 385-437-HELP (4357) or the regular Salem Fiber phone number at 385-437-4411. The only outage we experienced this week was during the maintenance window which is Thursday morning from midnight until 8 AM. We don’t use the maintenance window most weeks but this week we had to replace a defective fiber terminal and the outage affected about a dozen customers. System outages are so rare it looks like I never post about them but we haven’t had any for so long. Please don’t hesitate to call if you are experiencing issues. We want to help because we want everyone to love the network as much as we do! John Bowcut Salem Fiber

When we are ready I will post in the forum that I need testers and I would encourage you to sign up. Testers get connected a month early and they get the first month free but they may experience brief outages as we work the bugs out.

The overhead part of Olsen may be ready by early spring but the underground will need to wait until summer. Once the ground is frozen we try to avoid installing underground conduit and we concentrate on overhead installation.

You will need to provide your own WIFI router or you can subscribe to our managed WIFI service and we will provide the router and manage it for an additional $15 / month. If you already have a router or choose to purchase a WIFI router you can read about features and speeds of routers here: https://www.fiber.salemcity.org/pick-your-router Our fiber-to-the-home system does NOT use modems.

Although all our hardware and our provider support IPv6, we have not implemented any routing of IPv6 addresses. As the ability to run an IPv6 address without an IPv6 to IPv4 gateway improves we will reconsider deploying IPv6 capability.

The fee is $5/month. Please note that the reason to have a static IP on our system is greatly diminished because we don't use NAT and all of the addresses we give out are fully routable on the Internet.

This is a particularly difficult area of town to install fiber. We will need to directionally bore each side of the street to install the conduit and install boxes between the homes. It is going to take some time but we are coming. I would anticipate that we will begin working in the area next year.