Our story
Hi! My family moved to Badger Road in Kennewick, WA in 2018. We quickly found our area was under-served and limited in internet options. Frontier (now Ziply) only offers 3 Mbps DSL as we’re at the ‘end of the line’. With work from home and school and having fun — try working while your kids stream Netflix on 3Mbps– it was not working well. We checked with neighbors and the experience was not much different (high cost low performing satellite and slow ‘old tech’ fixed wireless).
We started Surfs Up in 2021 to help meet the need for high speed internet. We wanted to do fiber direct and found fixed wireless technology has improved and can now offer similar speeds with fiber latency and affordable pricing. Some day we’d love to expand and do Residential fiber. Until then, we offer Business fiber and Residential internet via fixed wireless.
What is Fixed Wireless?
If you haven’t heard of fixed wireless before it’s similar to Dish TV service where a small radio is installed and then the internet is run inside to a router. Fixed wireless gets it’s name from the radios being ‘fixed’ in location and pointed much like a magnifying glass to focus the signal in a single direction. This provides high reliability, stability and speed..!
If you’re a techie, the fixed wireless tech that we use only adds 2-5ms latency to our already low fiber backbone. So we see 9-14ms ping times while cable has 19-23ms ping times. This results in fast page loads and saves you time waiting for every piece of content, not just the large downloads. The fiber we link to is not shared with the entire city like other fiber or cable services. This makes it easier to offer a high quality service. Think of it like a private pool vs the public pool.
In 2021, the average US internet speed was 100Mbps Reference link . We surveyed customers and found they wanted 60-100Mbps download speeds. So we went with fixed wireless that offers 100Mbps as a starting point with 200M, 300M+ options as well. We plan to upgrade to faster options based on customer demand.
If you’d like to see if we can serve your location with high speed internet, fill out our form here to ‘Get Started‘.
Thanks!
Example Speed Test — 100 Mb Cable vs 100 Mb Surfs Up
Cable (off Clearwater St, Kennewick)
Surfs Up (over Fixed Wireless) – Kennewick, WA
As you can see from the “Cable vs Surfs Up” internet comparison the download/upload is nearly the same. Both offer a bit more than you pay for.
The difference is the ping or latency which is a measure of responsiveness.
Ping (lower is better/faster):
8ms on Surfs up vs 19ms on Cable
With Surfs Up pages load ‘instantly’ as there’s less wait time for each piece of content.