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We were notified today that all of REDI Net from Cuyamungue north has been cut off due to a truck taking down a pole with REDI Net fiber.
While there may be some changes in routing, our second fiber line / upstream ISP is carrying our customer traffic and access to the Internet should not be affected for our users.
Adding this second fiber line took a good deal of effort and expense, but we wanted a backup, and this is why.
We will be performing remote reconfiguration between 4-5am on Sunday 8/13 on the High School water tank in Espanola. This may result in 5-15 minutes of downtime for a subset of users.
We will be performing radio upgrades and realignments on Tuesday afternoon, weather permitting, which will result in several brief outages and periods of below-normal throughput as radios are replaced and reaimed. These changes should substantially improve performance for some users. Users in central and Eastern Española, as well as the Sombrillo/Dreamcatcher area may be affected.
UPDATED: T1 line is down again affecting phone service
We are having intermittent drop-outs with our T1 line today, this will affect customers trying to call our 505-852-**** numbers, and customers with VoIP lines with 505-852-**** phone numbers. Outgoing calls will work, but incoming calls may get an intermittent busy signal.
We have a ticket open with the phone company and they are working to remedy this. We are also exploring moving the phone service to our secondary fiber line for better reliability in the future.
For now please use the 844-544-9499 number to reach us.
Black Mesa Wireless started due to the presence of REDI Net, and has grown tremendously from those early days. We are grateful for the presence of REDI Net in the area and plan to continue to use it extensively.
With that said, running an ISP it is undesirable to have only one upstream provider. It presents a single point of failure should REDI Net go down (which has happened a few times) and provides limited routing options to the outside world.
Over the last few months, we have brought a second upstream provider online, and network traffic has been routing over both this second provider and REDI Net for the past week. Furthermore, today we finally added true IPv6 connectivity to our network. We've had IPv6 in testing on our own connection at the office and Brock's home connection for months now, via a tunnel with HE.net. Now that we have an upstream provider that fully supports IPv6, we can begin to route customer IPv6 traffic. We still have the backup connection with HE.net and are pressuring REDI Net to deploy IPv6 as well.
IPv6 is important to us because the world is out of IPv4 addresses. Black Mesa Wireless was turned down by ARIN for more IPv4 addresses several months ago, because they have no more to issue. We are currently in testing for the deployment of IPv6-only customers, and will begin to roll out new customers on IPv6 only in the near future. We have been extensively testing 464XLAT technologies, which will allow IPv6-only customers to access the IPv4 Internet. Moving forward, we will soon be charging extra for IPv4 addresses for new customers, as they are very much a finite commodity.
If you have any questions about using IPv6, please submit a message at http://bmwl.co/contact-us/
Brock M Tice, President and Co-Owner, Black Mesa Wireless LLC
Due to harmful interference from other spectrum users in Espanola we are troubleshooting one of the High School water tank access points now. We should be finished by 17:30 on 6/25.
Today we finally put up our second and final Española tower! Its installation had been postponed repeatedly for a number of reasons. This will be our final tower for some time, as we are implementing an expansion freeze to focus on our existing service areas.
The tower will be in testing for at least one week to ensure everything is functioning properly. Once testing is complete, we will begin installing customers with access via that tower. Thank you for your patience, and know that we have been working to balance expansion with service of existing customers, with emphasis on the latter.
Belkin is having a worldwide issue with their routers right now. If you have a Belkin router you may be able to use this workaround.
We generally recommend against Belkin routers. Our customers have had nothing but problems with them.
The power outage in Velarde on Sunday lasted one hour, five minutes. None of our network infrastructure shut down during this time, due to our extensive use of solar power and battery backups.
The REDI Net switch we are connected to went down after 20 minutes without power.
We hope this week to be connected to another REDI Net switch close to one of our towers, and a third in the next month or so. This will help us avoid disconnection in case of a power outage at one location.
As a reminder, if there is a power outage, your Internet service will go down unless you have a battery backup at your home or business, and all networking equipment required for your connection is powered by the battery backup. Such backups can be purchased inexpensively. This is a good example and will power your radio and router for approximately 7 hours:
Please feel free to contact us with any questions about this outage and power or network issues in general at support@blackmesawireless.com or 844-544-9499.
We are currently experiencing an Internet service outage due to a village-wide power outage in Velarde. Most of our equipment is on a battery backup, but unfortunately the REDI Net equipment in Velarde does not have a very long battery backup.
As such, we have no connectivity to REDI Net at this time. Once power is restored we expect service to be restored.
We have been working for months to establish additional connections to REDI Net throughout the valley to avoid this problem, but political issues in Espanola at the city, county, and school board levels have delayed our efforts.
We continue to work to establish these additional service connections and will let you know once they are completed.
Thank you for your patience.
As of today, our tower on Black Mesa (the longer, northern one) is live. We now have coverage of most of Española and even some points south of the city. However, we are working to add more tower locations in Española proper to ensure high-quality service. At the moment, points farther south than Lowe's may require a 2' dish for service quality that meets our stringent requirements.
We will post more updates here as we expand service. As always, please click here to register for a FREE site survey to check your lines of sight and signal.
Coverage as of 2014-05-02
As we grow we keep a close eye on our upstream bandwidth (you can, too!), and recently we got close to saturating it several times in a row.
As we promise in our terms of service, we upgraded our connection to REDI Net to handle the additional traffic and prevent slowing of service to customers. We guarantee we will do this if the connection is saturated for at least half an hour, but we prefer to upgrade before that ever happens.
There are other choices for Internet service in our service area, but none of them have the dedication to quality, transparency, and net neutrality that you will see from Black Mesa Wireless. We started this business because we understand the importance of a fast and reliable Internet connection in the modern world, and we'll deliver nothing less.
We have recently expanded our coverage again! We now cover from Velarde through almost all of Alcalde (trees permitting) and into Ohkay Owingeh. By the end of the week we expect to have coverage of approximately the northern half of Espanola, and more of Espanola in the next month or two. If you are interested in service, please register for a FREE site survey here and we will schedule an appointment with you to check your signal.
Our current coverage is shown in this map:
Coverage as of 2014-04-29
If you register and are not in our service area, we will contact you once coverage of your location is available.
You may have read recently that Comcast and Verizon have struck deals with Netflix, wherein Netflix pays them for adequate carriage of data to their common customers.
Black Mesa Wireless opposes such arrangements. We believe that our customers pay us to deliver the data they demand, whether from Linux distributions, Netflix, Apple FaceTime users, or anywhere else. Our network is designed to carry your streaming video as quickly and reliably as possible.
While we urge you to contact your representatives in support of better Net Neutrality rules from the FCC, know that you'll never need the FCC to enforce those rules on our network -- we will always treat all your data equally.
Just yesterday we did a site survey to make sure that the chosen repeater site for Alcalde had a good view of the main tower in Velarde. You can see it in this picture. It's a good clear view, so we hope to have this all installed and operational by the end of February. Thanks for your patience as we extend our coverage throughout the valley.
View of Velarde Tower from Lyden/Alacalde Repeater Site
I offer voice over IP services, but in Velarde and Espanola I cannot offer local numbers. It appears that the 505-852 and 505-753 rate centers are not portable. This also means that if you get a phone line through me I cannot port your local land line number.
I hate to have to break this news, but in the interest of full disclosure, after discovering this unpleasant fact when trying to port a customer's number, I wanted to make it quite clear to potential customers.
I can still provide 505 and 575 numbers with unlimited domestic calling, but the numbers will not be local.
I plan to file a complaint over this with the FCC.
The water tank tower, on the tank behind Michael's Mini Mart on the hill in Velarde has been installed. Generally, if you can see the tank, you are eligible for service. In practice, if you are beyond Mile Marker 11 to the south on Highway 68 you will not get an adequate signal. We are working to add coverage for customers further south and will post updates when we have them.
At long last the water tank tower in Velrade is going up. The pole has already been installed on the water tank, and the equipment should be installed in the next few days. Once this tower is complete, the temporary tower will be powered down. The switchover should barely be noticeable if at all.
If you pre-registered and I haven't contacted you or followed up with you yet, it's because I've been waiting until this tower is deployed.
