As you can see from our first FTTH (Fiber to the Home) download test, we are screaming. Faster than any other provider by far. We are the new GOLD STANDARD for The Greater Highland Lakes Rural Internet. NO OTHER provider drills their own fiber or has the certified staff to do so. Accept no substitute, the future of internet in this area is here.
Holiday 2019 Schedule
Our entire Hyper Fusion office will be shutting down at the end of the day Friday at 3PM to close for our Winter Break until Jan. 2nd. During this time, no live customer support staff or office staff will be available however, Emili can assist with basic things. Our NOC will have an on call engineer watching the network in case of emergency as well as 1 on call field staff in case of emergency repair.
Additionally, due to another recent posting somewhere, which we haven’t figured out yet, we’ve had yet another explosion of new service requests. As much as it is a pain in the butt, we are now COMPLETELY BOOKED OUT FOR THE MONTH OF JANUARY. So, if you sign up for service, please note, although we can get your survey conducted in January, you will not be able to be installed until February, so please ONLY register if you are willing to wait. We are in super high demand as you can see from the speed test above as a result. We, unlike most providers, take the time and care to carefully correct all issues in our network and customer portal system. We are also taking the time to upgrade some key repeater sites that where horribly damaged by staff that are no longer with us.
Hyper Vision Cloud TV Update
As we get nearer our public beta release of our Hyper Vision Cloud TV service, we are now rolling out the live TV functions of the service. Our on-demand / DVR / Streaming library and basic interface which we’re using a 3rd part interface, but the transcoding and server processing is done in house, and the new Hyper Vision proprietary interface will be launched with the public beta. With that, we are looking for 10 more ACTIVE AND IN GOOD STANDING Hyper Fusion customers to join our alpha testing for the live TV functions and Cloud DVR functions. We are also looking for a special 5 users to help test the Hyper Vision Nintendo Switch Application. That’s right folks, we have finally received our Nintendo Switch dev kit and will be launching our officially licensed Nintendo Switch Hyper Vision Cloud TV app starting with the Switch. Get access to all your TV, DVR, on the go or at home with your switch! With my new compression I’m able to hit a full 1080 HD while only using 1.5 to 2 Mbps of internet to drastically save on mobile data while your out and about. Just check out the little video. =) If your interested, just private message @HFT-Chris and he will get you info and you’ll need to ask him if you want to be an alpha test. It costs nothing right now, and is 100% free. We will be selecting 5 of the alpha testing group to beta test the new mobile TV boxes / 4G LTE hotspots / Mobile power desktop / Gaming PC / 100% zero cords plug into it plugless TV box, set top box hybrid device thingys, lol. We’re calling them Hyper Vision Boxes as a prototype name, but I’m sure our awesome business team will come up with some kewl name..
Real Time Network News Update
So, surely seems like Slack was the way to go. We’re pushing almost 1/4 of our customer base is in our slack chat now, so we’re hoping to get at least 75% of our customer base in there, so for those of you who haven’t done so yet, login to your Fusion Portal, click on your control panel, and the button to jump in our real time network news chat is in there. ALL of our staff are in there, and when they are not, our AI built in house, is able to answer some basic questions. We are building quite a set of tools from help files from Emili, to network settings short cuts, all kinds of things and our customers are LOVING IT.
Hey folks, just to let everyone know, we have finally settled on Slack as our new platform for our Realtime Network News customer chat. We have all our staff in there as well. So, EVERYONE can always get network status questions and be in the know. And as you can see from the speed test results, making the change we did over the summer was CERTAINLY what the doctor ordered. The results speak for themselves.
In order to get into our Slack Workspace, you must be a currently active customer and login to your Fusion Portal online, and then click on the “Control Panel” link on the left hand side of your Fusion portal, as pictured and you’ll see a “Join Us On Slack” button there. It is a good idea to sign up for a free Slack account first. It’s 100% free, only requires your email address, and you can set any display name you like, so its super privacy friendly. https://www.slack.com Once you’ve signed up, then login to your Fusion Portal and click the button. We’ll see you there! =)
DATA THRU PUT
We also recently saw one of our competitors posted their overall network usages for a 7 day period which clocked out at a little over 25 TB. Below is a screen shot out of JUST 1 of our campground park wide systems. As you can see, we push well over twice that off just a SINGLE customer. Our 1 campground does more than twice the amount of thru put as that particular competitor. We clearly outclass most other competitors in our market. This is what you can expect from an internet company founded by technology folks and not business folks. Clearly we know what the business guys are after. We are professional technology people folks, with 60+ years of technology experience behind our top 3 technology partners, it shows in our results, how much data we move, and the fact that we’re the ONLY rural provider for hundreds of miles that does fiber and rural fiber IN HOUSE, and once we have our live Streaming TV launched sometime next year; we WILL be the top rated and top grossing provider in the Greater Highland Lakes and Central Texas areas. Every day we are drilling with our customer support and staying on our field team to keep their amazing work going!
BURNET SOUTH FIBER WILL BE GOING LIVE THIS WEEK EVERYONE!!!
Competitors Copying Us
We’ve also had several folks ask us what we’re going to do about the other competitors blatantly copying our website posts, and other functions of our business model, the short answer; nothing, as copying is the sincerest form of flattery and clearly have no ability to come up with unique ideas on their own. Besides, Hyper Fusion is happy to lead the way in the gold standard of rural internet and happy to lead the way and show others how to do it properly so everyone can thrive and flourish.
Feeding trolls is a complete waste of time. Besides, we are busy out installing new customers and building new repeater sites, while they are stuck at their office, busy copying our work, and when they can’t duplicate it, they just call up AT & T, let them install it, and than slap their sticker on it and call it a day. That’s not what we do. We’re also not going to be making any more social media posts about it, or even entertain it anymore. We kindly ask that our current and future customer base, just accept that we are far to busy to even give it a second thought and with only a single tower, it won’t be long before they go out of business anyhow. We are no longer even concerned with any facebook posts, so we’re just going to let that horse stay dead and buried once and for all. We are far to busy building a professional company, and providing LIVE internet services to customers all across Burnet, Lampasas, Llano, Belle, and Williamson counties. We kindly thank everyone in advance.
I’m sure as many of you know, over the last several months there’s been a drastic increase, and improvement across all areas of Hyper Fusion. The network is faster, customer support has drastically improved, appointments are being kept on time, and the backlog is being piled through in a hurry. The proof is in the pudding as they say. It seems we are doing FAR better. All the way around. We have a new field person who actually installs our circuits to code, a well trained new live customer support person, and we also have an insanely good business management team. Also we have welcomed our new awesome Accounting Manager whose really help to shift the tide here at Hyper Fusion.
As a reminder, our current primary office phone number is ( 512 ) 790 – 2250
Our Live Customer Support Agent Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am – 4PM
South Network Exhaustion Progress
We have finally have power at our Burnet Gateway Fiber DMARC site. FINALLY! We are now just waiting on our upstream provider to come out and deliver our device to get this network cooking. The uplink to Burnet Main has already been installed and already measured at the full 1.5 Gbps transfer rate between our Burnet Main tower to our new gateway site. This will be a massive upgrade from the current 0.3 Gbps transfer rate we have now. Our primary gateway access to the internet will also be fully off the Spectrum Coax that went 300 Mbps down by 20 Mbps, to a circuit connection that runs at 1,000 Mbps down and up! This will no doubt make anyone connected to the south network screaming fast and resolve those exhaustion issues. We will make a public post on our site once it is hot, although most of you will see the difference as soon as you use your internet. Please be advised that when we do go hot at our DMARC that you may lose service for 5-10 minutes while we make the change, but you will come right back up with faster speeds.
Realtime Network News Chat Officially Moves to Slack
If you are an active Hyper Fusion customer and want to join the new real time news group chat, simply login to your portal, and on the left hand menu, click on Control Panel, and as in the example screenshot below, you’ll see the slack button. Just make sure you have signed up for a slack account. Why the move to slack? Well, for starters, hangouts will eventually be going away, and we didn’t want to use any service tied to Facebook or Google, Apple. We also needed a chat that Emili could interface with. We offer this chat as a service to our customers as a courtesy and we feel Slack is the best choice for Hyper Fusion.
Slack has a web interface, android app, and an apple app, so no matter which way you’d like to use it, there is an interface for you.
New Live Customer Support Agent Has Joined The Live CSA Pool
We’re pleased to announce we have a new agent working our Live CSA Pool. That means, during all normal live customer support hours ( Tuesday – Friday, 10am – 4PM ) she will be answering phones and taking web chat support requests from visitors on our website. As I’m sure some of you have started to notice, nearly every call is being answered now.
Holiday Hours
The following list of days our live customer support call center will be closed:
First, we would like to apologize we havn’t posted a weekend update in a few weekends as we have been busy helping in the field and conducting other business so we figured we would put out this weekends update a little early as we move into the weekend. As the month draws to a close there have been some ups, and there have been some downs. I figure best to start with the downs.
Google Hangouts Closing & New Platform for Realtime News Group Chat Required
As much as it sucks we’ve known for sometime this was going away. We have created a voting form for all our loyal customers to choose the new platform we move to in order to handle the realtime news group chat. We have selected the choices based off our programmers knowledge and abilities to link them into our communications platform. Voting will close Nov. 1st and that weekend we will impliment the top voted platform for the new real time news group chat. Here is a link to the anonymous voting form:
Monday, November 4th we have a scheduled job to take down the North network completely. We’re having to repair the fiber line that one of our old terminated staff from this summer attempted to do and turns out they can not terminate fiber like we had expected. In some rare cases during heavy network load speeds off random customers are effected by this so we are replacing all the ends and calling in a professional fiber company to fix the ends since this particular staff whom we can not name refuses to return our fiber tools so that we can and those are specialized tools that you can’t just go down to the home depot and buy. We are going to do this early in the morning at 7 am, and shouldn’t take more than an hour to complete. Additionally, we will be installing a full professional dual cabinet fiber DMARC ground mounted fiber DMARC equipment enclosure with our shiny new permit to put in the right of way as the Primary Lampasas County Fiber Gateway, and we will be removing the shaddy old equipment shed that’s there now as well as completely replacing all lines on the tower and upgrading the west and south access points to the super heavy duty big Gen 6 chesty access points.
Additionally as 580 Midway ( Little Repater ) and Adamsville South ( yes, that’s adamsville south, we do have a repeater a good 18 to 20 miles north of Lampasas we’ve never announced until now ) are growing, we will be adding 2 dedicated backbone radios for both of those sites since they are currently connecting to the west AP and causing it to clog up with traffic at peak times. We will also be adding a full DC circuit with 4 day batter system to prevent any stupid power problems and a chesty lightning arresting system. We will be making climbs here and there completing this in phases and completing it with the fiber being repaired and the kempner North site officially becoming the Lampasas County Gateway.
In order to merge the 2 networks into one, and get it so all customer circuits can use either gateway depending on weather its up or down, or under heavy load or light load, we have to add some networking gear to several of our tower sites, so this will take some time to complete. Once we are complete with this process we can fully roll out the IPv6 network and no more X-Box problems for anyone.
Briggs / Arrowhead
For reasons we can not release yet we had to disassemble the Arrowhead repeater. We will be moving it over the next 2 weeks to another location we had been working on lining up. Thru going out there to recover our gear and our utility pole transport trailer, we have learned it had been damaged and destroyed beyond repair. As such, the Briggs installations will have to be delayed a week so we can hire a transport company to come move the utility poles for us. This situation ended up completely outside our control and we do apologize about this and will get the work completed just as soon as we can. We know there are lots of folks in that area and a few businesses anxiously waiting on this site to be completed.
Burnet South Fiber Gateway
We’ve had a delay with the power situation, seems our work order got screwed up somewhere when we had ordered a 125amp service, we purchased all 125amp rated gear and our power pedistal got a 200amp main so we’re waiting for that to come get switched out next week so we can get our power meter installed and the fiber fired up.
Equrina Big Tower
The big insane huge tower trench for the Equrina big tower and preparation of the tower base foundation and guy points is all set to be complete with concrete dropped mid next week and we will be building the tower with in a few days after that pending weather works with us.
7 Creeks Backbone Repair
We should be making the climb on Burnet Main for this repair on Monday. All 7 creeks customers are still effected by the wonky speed issue.
Kingsland North
We will be adding a chesty full gig backbone radio pair from Eagles Nest to Kingsland North. Kingsland is one of our fast growing areas so its just time. We’re hoping to do this mid next week and the few active customers that are down or having had completed installs will be completed the same day and couple of days after.
Council Creek ( North Lake Buchanan / Spider Mount area / Wolf Creek )
Our Council Creek repeater site is rock solid now and we will be adding a chesty full gig backbone radio pair from Eagles Nest as well to serve that area. That area is also one of our faster growing areas. We will be completing a bigger permanent tower at the same site after Halloween and all the customers out there will be re-pointed to the new tower right after.
Kempner Main / Chica Ranch
This is our very next big job up as soon as weather allows. We will be raising the Kempner Main tower located at the Our Friends 2 park an additional 20 feet and putting up the SUPER beefy radio pair we just took down from arrowhead up which will super charge this link, and provide WELL more than enough bandwidth for all our current customers and about another 75 to 80 customers we’re calculating, but to keep everyone speedy, we’re going to limit it to 50 until we get Kempner North hardline fiber connected.
Chica Ranch Fiber To The Home
We have just 2 more land owners to get in touch with to get the clearances that Hamilton requires for us to hang fiber to chica. We do have our DMARC site secured and ready to go just still working on the leg work. We’re REALLY hoping to get it in before black friday, but it’s probably going to be in December before the first installs start going in.We just finally got out there to repair the original fiber to the home customer we had live that one of the old staff we terminated this summer cut trenched and cut right thru.
Drastic Overall Performance Increase
As some of you know, and some of you don’t, we had a drastic change in staff in the beginning of June of this summer. Additionally we there was the tornado in Kempner that took out our Kempner South repeater site and roughly 80 customer circuits that had been installed by the staff that where terminated that they took short cuts on and didnt’ install guy lines or improperly installed mounts and all the damage caused by the storm from these improper installations. Will has worked tirelessly since then to repair everyone, and we’re down to less than 10 left. He’s also repaired alot of the tower work that the previous staff had drastically messed up as well.
For the most part, our network is nearly back to 100% now. Since Will is fully back at the help of Hyper Fusion and had full control back of everything and flushed the inferior staff and replaced them with much more capable folks we’ve had a drastic shift all the way around on all fronts. Our new office manager has managed to help get us all in shape to pick up our customer support response and communication which has drastically improved. Our new business manager / CFO whose actually qualified to be doing that sort of work with multiple decades of experience has managed to work with a books person we hired to completely rebuild our books from scratch, gotten all our sales tax, and federal taxes, and all that jazz all filed and caught up since they where behind and even got a good chunk of them paid and well on our way to having them all paid off. We’ve gotten alot of our backbills caught up and other annoying little things left un-done done and complete. Revenues are up, service quality is getting better, and we’re about to have a major upgrade to the south network. Our Alexa traffic ranking graph over the past 90 days along with the revenue increases and our new properly formed business team have really managed to get Hyper Fusion back on track and well on our way to becoming the dominant internet provider in the Greater Highland Lakes area. Just look at the Alexa rankings from our competitors below. Proof is in the pudding folks.
On a much bigger note, we are just a few weeks away from releasing our first new custom radios with built in backup 4G LTE connections. That’s right folks, we’re packing the power of the mobile hotspot right into our radios so your never all the way out of internet. Our new custom radio comes with built in 4G LTE fail over back up provided by our nationwide 4g LTE partner and get all the benifits of the several new 4G LTE providers right into your fixed point wireless radio and never have to worry about being totally out of internet again. If your interested in one of these new custom radios that you can ONLY get thru Hyper Fusion cause we’re building em ourselves, then email sales@hyperfusiontech.com with 4G LTE backup radio in the subject line, and we’ll get you on the list.
So everyone managed to get ALOT of work done last week. We’ve managed to get our Burnet Fiber gateway power post and everything installed so we can light up Briggs with live service, as well as the Burnet Fiber to the Home & Business DMARC. We’re getting ever closer to linking the networks into one massive much stronger network. We are OFFICIALLY THE ONLY PROVIDER IN THE HILL COUNTRY in our class to have dual fiber gateways from 2 different providers. Don’t be fooled folks, ALL the other providers in Lampasas County do nothing but re-sell AT & T fiber which has been there for years. We also picked up gear for the remaining folks that are waiting on repairs. Also, we have received good news that, Blake our newest field engineer, is moving from part time to full time at some point during this month so that should help alot.
The week Upcoming
So as I’m sure many of you know, until we get the networks both fully joined into a single network, we have a very tight scheduled, and it may have changed drastically from what was posted last week in real time news chat. With that in mind, all day Monday we will be working on the big Equrina Fields tower. This is a key tower in the network joining process.
Tuesday we will be trenching and fixing up some customers in Council Creek that have been waiting MONTHS for repairs. As well we will be climbing Burnet Main to put up a new 7 Creeks backbone radio to resolve the weird issue out there.
Wednesday and Thursday we will have Blake and another gentleman in Kempner getting those customers fixed up and ready. Due to Will and Chris having to finish up the Burnet folks and complete out the Briggs fiber DMARC installation, we will not be able to finish the Kempner Main repeater until monday of next week.
Thursday we will be in Lampasas finishing off a few repairs and a couple new installs so we’re full up on Thursday. This Friday we do not have ANYTHING scheduled as we’re saving it for any work we miss this week to ensure that EVERYONE gets helped this week and all our tower and delivery network work get done.
Best Way to Get Help
As a reminder we have multiple people working support tickets now, and not all during normal business hours, as I’m sure many of you have noticed from times of reply. We ask that everyone focus their request there when ever possible. Go online, on your computer or phone and login to your Fusion Portal and click the support tab on the left. We do however have live customer agents available Tuesday through Friday 10am to 4PM for phone and live website chat support if you prefer. Outside of Live Support Agent hours, Emili, our AI, can also help you. You can call, SMS, or send our Facebook page a message to interact with Emili. She can give you all kinds of information.
It has come to our attention that there were some customer refunds that were not mailed out this summer. If you are still expecting a refund from last year and didn’t get it, please email billing@hyperfusiontech.com and we will get you fixed up right away. Please be patient, we didn’t mean to over look those few folks that didn’t get them. However, now that we have flushed the old staff that caused all those issues to begin with at the beginning of 2019, we’ve had no more issues with circuits and we’re down to less then 10 folks who have yet to be repaired system wide. Just take a look at your customer number, we started with customer one. And if you just signes up for services in the last 6 months, check your customer ID number ( we’re renaming this to your Account ID# now as well, just so everyone knows ) and you’ll know how many customers we have. ALOT, lol. Especially for just a little company of less then 10 staff, and only 3 of those are field staff.
The Hyper Fusion Difference
Unlike any other provider in our class in our area, we install and deploy our own private fiber and we are the only provider to do so. In order to do this, not only do you have to know what your doing, but you also have to prove to other agencies you know what your doing. You also have to file for BUILDING PERMITS to be able to do work like this, especially in the public right of ways. As you can see, Hyper Fusion has ZERO problems sharing this, as permits are public information anyhow. No other provider has posted any permits at all. Well, where are the photos of their guys installing it? Where is there publicly available permits? You just simply can’t find them because they don’t exist. The ONLY provider other than the big box that have been in the area to have been issued such permits is HYPER FUSION. This fiber gateway location was super important to Hyper Fusion and the community because it is now able to service the Briggs fiber DMARC. the Briggs location is DIRECTLY connected to the Burnet site, already. We just have to go splice in some fiber cable ports to plug into our fiber routers and switches and away we go. ( Essentially, go put an cable end on the cable so it will plug into stuff ).
And the claims that we got some big outside investor is just not true. Hyper Fusion was and is 100% funded and fueled by our owners. Period. Hyper Fusion was started FOR this area by folks FROM this area. This is the reason we are going just a touch slower than normal, because our ownership pool and combination of company funds is what builds this. Chris and Will earn every penny they get and dump it right back into the company. They do not drive around in brand new trucks or run around in Armani suits. Over the last 2 years, they have CLEARLY made a commitment to their community to provide the best possible internet at the best possible price. Here are some photos below of the Burnet fiber location and Will working out in the country in the right of way, as our legally obtained permit allows us. Don’t be tricked with getting stuck with AT & T through another re-seller. Get internet that runs on a TOTALLY separate network and never run the risk of getting stuck in the clog of AT & T fiber.
Additionally, as I’m sure you’ll see the odd photo out, we’ve created a brand new customer quick start guide. That clearly breaks out all our little funny nuances about Hyper Fusion and how to get started with your new service to ensure help and communication is established right from the point of survey. I’m sure most of you would have loved to have a quick start guide. By next weekend we will be posting the QuickStart guide available for download and pdf format.
Monday – Tuesday – Now that we have our permit for our south fiber we will be working on the pieces to finish this off to light up all of our south networks with ALOT more internet and light up our Briggs site and we will be climbing to replace the 7 Creeks backbone.
Tuesday – Wednesday – We will be working on Kempner Main and getting the last of the Kempner customer repairs and waiting installs completed.
Wednesday – Thursday – We had to order mounts and things for Lampasas, those items should be in so that we can get the Lampasas repairs and installs finished.
Friday – We will be fine tuning Equrina and activating the new power uplink with the new fiber to Eagles Nest repeater, thusly feeding Kingsland and Council Creek with ALOT more internet.
Weekend Maintenance Completed
Updated our front end websites core software and plugin updates
Ran some massive updates on our portal server and added in 6 more CPU cores so the portal is fire fast again.
Installed new uplink radios on Lampasas East and Lampasas south doubling internet capacity at those sites.
Completed configuring Burnet Fiber DMARC gear ready for deployment next week
Upgrades Completed
We have now completed upgrading our phone system so that it will process outage reports thru Emili’s Virtual Agent interface as well as voicemail support ticket creation when a caller calls during normal live customer support agent hours but no one happens to be available.
Redesigned customer invoices so they now include customers “customer since” date, Customer ID#, and other useful information for getting better customer support.
Added a new emergency notification bar to the top of our website. When there’s a major issue effecting out network we will post it there. When the issue is resolved it will disappear. There’s a sample posted below. We highly suggest, if you have no internet, but you have a phone with a 4g LTE data connection, to check our website. If you don’t have enough data to accomplish that, then simply text our primary number 512-790-2250 with the following trigger phrase: “Hey Emili, is there an outage” and you should get the same information. Very soon, both of these sources will read their data from the same place which is our backend issue tracking system so the data will always be propagated in real time so that no staff has to update either Emili’s messages or the website trigger, it will all be done programmatically and in a real-time automated fashion to get the latest in precise information.
Well everyone seems our new format is having MUCH better results then the past few weeks and has drastically beefed up the number of jobs we’re getting done in a week. We do ask that if your still waiting for an appointment, do be patient with us as we finish getting caught up. It’s definitely working. We are still having some bugs in our phone system which should be resolved this weekend. We do apologize for this, but as you can see, it’s yielding fantastic results.
Upcoming Weeks Schedule
Holding true to our new format, we are posting the areas in which we will be in and on what days during our weekend update. This will help get questions answered for customers waiting for on-site service calls no matter the reasons.
Monday – Tuesday: Lampasas
Just a handful of customers left to repair and 1 to install
Tuesday – Wedneday: Kempner / Chica Ranch
We will be finishing of the Kempner Main repeater as well as tuning the downlink connection to Chica Ranch which will return all speeds to normal off these two repeaters.
Wednesday – 7 Creeks / Naruna / Lake Victor
We will be doing some trenching out at Naruna to prepair to fiber connect it back to the new Burnet Gateway. Additionally, the 7 creeks downlink radio on the Burnet Main side needs to be replaced, and this will resolve the slow speed issues out at 7 Creeks
Thrusday – Eagles Nest / Kingsland / Burnet ( Scattered Storms )
We will be mounting a brand new gigabit radio on Eagles Nest to repair to connect it to the new fiber. We ill also be putting up a new beefy 1/2 gig downlink to Kingsland North in place of the starter link that’s there now. This will MASSIVELY beef up the Kingsland area connections.
Friday – Open, for storm re-schedules
Inclement Weather Policy Update
As we are in the throws of hurricane season we decided to post our weather policy again and update it a bit for those folks who do not know. As per OSHA regulations on most of this stuff, obviously due to the type of internet we deploy, Hyper Fusion has adopted several factors that we use to ensure the safety of our staff, which is paramount to keeping things cooking here at Hyper Fusion. For the most part, we will only call a “weather day” if winds exceed 10mph, if there is heavy rain, or if lightning is flying off everywhere. Especially those jobs with steep roofs, metal roofs, or utility pole climbing. Although we can, we also doing like trenching fiber during bad weather either. If you have an appointment that happens to be called due to weather, we will generally start calling or contacting the weekend before to get you rescheduled if we know the storm is going to be bad. As we are in the throws of hurricane season as well, we have also been busy on weekends testing our field gear directly in these horrible conditions for Project DIRT.
Arrowhead Ranch, Cottonwood Mesa, and Blackbuck Ridge Repeater Sites
As some of you may know, some of the old staff we had to let go at the beginning of the summer are associated with the company that’s building out Arrowhead Ranch, Cottonwood Mesa, and Blackbuck Ridge repeater sites. We are pleased to announce that we are working with their management to ensure that these repeaters stay right where they are so they are able to provide residents with fantastic internet. Although we do not have all the particulars worked out, we believe their management is working with in the best interest of its residents. After all, we’re pretty sure they want what’s best for their sub-division. Don’t want what happened to the City of Lampasas to happen to the residents of these sub-divisions. Although some of these folks where just not the right fit for Hyper Fusion, we believe they will continue to work with us in a professional manner to ensure that folks in these sub-divisions are not put of internet. Even though we’ve heard LOTS of interesting stories from customers regarding all the staff that was let go back then, we are more then confident that they are now working with us to achieve the same goal of providing their residents with the best internet around. We can’t imagine that there is any reason why they would do anything to prevent delivery of internet like the City of Lampasas has.
Cancellation of City Wide Internet in Lampasas
We are sad to announce that we have canceled our roll out of city wide wifi for Lampasas due to the City’s foul practices. After meeting with the mayor and city manager of Lampasas and learning directly from them, that they used most of the research that Hyper Fusion did in order to hatch a plan to control the city internet themselves we will no longer be offering ANY services to residents of the City of Lampasas. If you are already a customer, you will remain connected, however, any new residents that reside with in city limits will no longer be eligible for services. Even though we have live ready to go fiber infrastructure right in town due to the City’s choices, we will be hauling all deployments with in town, and moving right past Lampasas North and West. After learning also from several upstream providers directly telling us they would not provide us services if we brought them with in city limits of Lampasas, we thought we ought to follow the restrictions of our cherry contract with them and to ensure that everyone gets the internet that the big city gets. And yes folks, there are VERY strong reasons some of the upstream wholesale fiber companies refuse to bring fiber into Lampasas. They don’t want them upping peoples utility bills as they plan to. Additionally, how much confidence can you have in their utility department when they have had all the problems they have had over the couple of years, and now these people think they know how to run a major enterprise class fiber network? Yikes.
Burnet South Gateway Fiber Installation
We are pleased to announce the City of Burnet IS working with us in our deployment of a brand new fiber DMARC in Burnet that will offer fiber to the home and business in the City of Burnet. Unlike the City of Lampasas, it’s quite clear that they understand the economic impact this type of service can have on local commerce and getting new residents into town. Although these permits to do so are rather expensive considering, Hyper Fusion believes these costs to be more than reasonable and fair. However, we will not be changing our fiber prices what so ever as a result, as we are not here to rob the customer. Hyper Fusion would like to recognize the City of Burnet utility department for assisting Hyper Fusion in every way they can to ensure this fiber goes in. We couldn’t be more thrilled to work with them. They have some awesome folks over there in the utility department and their offices. However, the same can’t be said for most electrical contractors. Not sure why, but most seem to be difficult to work, but Hyper Fusion has found a solid electrical contractor we are working with on this splice point to ensure all codes and regulations are followed. The City of Burnet required us to change a few things in our manner of deployment which we are happy to do. This however, has caused a delay of a week or 2 on this fiber. We kindly ask everyone to remain patient while we wait for the City of Burnet to do their part. These sort of things when working with the city utility department take some time due to code. The utility staff of Burnet do not make these regulations, but just like us, are required by law to follow them. And Hyper Fusion certainly is never going to break the law, just to get some work done.
If you emailed into our special on-site request box already, YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO SO AGAIN. We’re aware of every request, and look thru this list every day and only delete them once they have been completed. However, if you have not emailed in yet, and are still waiting on a service call, please email onsite-request@hyperfusiontech.com with your request and we will get you in the rotation as soon as humanely possible.
IMPORTANT REMINDER NOTICE: OUR PRIMARY PHONE NUMBER HAS CHANGED TO 512-790-2250. OUR SMS NOTIFICATIONS WILL ALSO COME FROM THAT NUMBER AND ALL OFFICIAL SMS / MMS MESSAGES WILL START WITH ( [Hyper Fusion]).
Fusion Portal
Installed Emili integration software and API’s required to tie phone system into our Fusion Portal system so they become one in the same. In the upcoming weeks Chris will be completing the pieces to fully integrate Emili into our crm system (Fusion Portal).
Customer Support Policy Updates
Our live customer support hours have changed to Tuesday thru Friday from 10am to 4PM. As soon as we open our public office where customers will be able to come in to pay their bill, sign up for new services, and purchase home internet based products. Then our customer support hours will expand to 6 days a week, and open earlier as well. We will post an announcement of course when this occurs.
Field Work Plan For Sept 16th – 28th
While working this week, if you’re out of service in one of the areas listed in this section, or if you require an onsite repair, our field teams will be coming to visit you on the days listed along with the repair of the repeater you’re connected to. If you’re not listed, please contact support for more information.
Monday (9/23) : Council Creek / Spider Mountain Valley
Tuesday (9/24) : Eagles Nest
Wednesday ( 9/25) : Kingsland North
Thursday ( 9/26) : Briggs Fiber DMARC Install
Friday ( 9 /27) : Kempner Fiber Gateway Beef-up & overhaul
Saturday (9/28) : Burnet Main Overhaul (This job will take 2 days, all weekend, and will be down most of the time, please plan accordingly.)
Front-end Website Updates
Updated the security and web statistics tracking software. Changed out from Google to Alexa so they can get a better idea of our traffic. Also updated our web server software to latest version with lots of much needed security patches and speed increases.
Emili Updates
Emili has now complete access within our phone, SMS, and messaging system. During live support hours (Tuesday – Friday, 10am – 4pm) you will be given the option to contact a live support agent. Outside of those hours, Emili, our virtual agent will be able to assist you. Again, as time goes on and our team teaches her to interact with our delivery network more and more, she will be able to get folks back online by logging into their circuits and checking on real time circuit statistics. Chris has laid a good chunk of the rest of the framework to make Emili much more usable and easier to understand. As a reminder, you can get a current list of all of Emili’s “trigger phrases” to get her to help you with common customer support processes.
We are hiring for junior and senior installers, starting at $14 / hour plus $20 per Diem for qualified senior installers with their own truck and tools. Once you’ve completed your 50th live install we’re offering a $1,000 bonus. And once you’ve completed your 100th live install, a $2,500 bonus. Free internet and HyperNET Mobile service is also available for qualifying staff once requirements are met.
I recently put in an email for a service request because I read it on last weeks post, but no one has called me back, what do I do?
We have not forgotten about y’all. We took everyone that emailed in, triage each case based on several factors and started scheduling. We will be calling several folks back tomorrow late in the evening as everyone will be out working on our Friends 1 and Kempner Gateway tomorrow. As we work through this week, most of you will be repaired or installed. Additionally, we have received several mesh router systems that were due for our special we were running, so if you qualified for an AmpliFi Mesh router system but haven’t received it yet, you will be called tomorrow to schedule installation.
Hey everyone, just a quick post to let everyone know of the way we set our phone system. It’s pretty much back to normal and just like it was, however, please note the following changes:
Live Customer Phone & Webchat Support hours are changed to Monday thru Friday, 9am to 4PM ( except our live customer support will be closed Monday, September 16, every other monday we will be available though.
Chris’s incoming SMS Texting is fully disabled, and he is unable to receive any more texts or phone calls on his mobile phone and all calls and messages moving forward will simply be dropped. Everyone he was privately talking to, needs to contact Customer Support directly moving forward.
Our primary number changed from 512-790-2252 to 512-790-2250 please make a note of this.
Our phone system, when you call in, if its under normal business hours you’ll get the option to either press 1 or say “live agent” to speak with a live person, or you can press 2 or say “Hey Emily” and Emily will try and help you out. If its outside of normal live customer support hours, your call will automatically be routed directly to Emily.
Emily now has her linkage software built that in a few days will allow our customers to call up after hours and have her reboot gear and do other troubleshooting procedures by actually logging into equipment, not just talking you thru some complex procedure you have to do and getting frustrated with it and getting lost.
These changes, updates, and simplifications of our communication system should ensure a much better customer experience with Hyper Fusion and will make sure our staff doesn’t over look any details, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.
Just a quick post to let everyone know, tomorrow morning I will be forwarding our primary new number to our Office Managers phone directly here at some point today so direct phone dialing will work. Our phone company has informed us that the port over from our old provider to our new provider will be completed in 48 hours from this post, so after that phones will return to normal and EMILI will only act as a helper outside of normal office hours. As I teach her more and more, she will get more and more useful.
We have created a survey. We ask that everyone who has called, texted, or Facebook Messenger’d with EMILI to fill out our survey so we can improve her neural logic and tune her more to our needs. Please bear in mind, this is a brand new type of technology that we JUST released, and like anything else on launch, its a bit buggy until I can work out the kinks.
Change In Standard Weekly Update Notification Procedures
Hey everyone, to make it a bit more simple, we will now be having someone from our team post a weekend update post, just like this one. We will have this generally posted at sometime on Sunday, so the post is up and ready for everyone to read first thing Monday mornings. As we grow our new management team has recognized the need for once per week meetings to make sure all our field staff, office staff, and other teams are all on the same page. With that in mind, it is important to understand that over the next two weeks we are changing over a lot of our business procedures AND network to get things complete stable network wide. With the new plan we’ve put in place and everyone that did need help emailing in as instructed, it will allow us to get everyone on the schedule tomorrow and those of you who emailed in as instructed will be getting put on the schedule and will be getting phone calls tomorrow to confirm appointments.
PLEASE NOTE: We are working VERY hard sweating our @#$% off and busting our backs so that each and everyone of you can get fixed and we can resolve our spring and early summer no shows as a result of the shady job those terminated staff where doing. Moving forward now that we have a solid management team, a much better trained office staff, and a MUCH more trained and HIGHLY capable field staff put together over the next 2 weeks things should level out rather quickly. If you emailed in for a repair over the weekend, all of our staff will be busy all day Monday working out this weeks schedule to get you all repaired and our field team is fresh off a break and ready to get cracking on everything. We will get most of you called back before the day is out. Anyone we miss, we will get you first thing Tuesday morning. With the transfer of the phone system to a new provider and all our network IP’s switching over to our new fiber provider, phone support will be very spotty this week, as will web chat support. We highly recommend you use the ticket system this week or call EMILI if your not having any luck with web chat support or phone support.
After September 16th our live phone and webchat support hours will expand to Tuesday thru Friday 9am to 4PM. All customer support agents and field staff we give off the day before and day after the following holidays if they land during the week; Easter, Summer Break ( June 19 – June 23 ) , July 4th, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and our Christmas Break runs from Dec 23rd to Jan. 2nd each year. During Christmas Break NO ONE will be around or doing anything.
With the massive influx of new signups from yet another media posting we really need some more solid field folks. No experience is required to becoming a Junior Customer Premise Engineer and we start at $12.50 / hr and guarantee a raise to $14 / hr if you pass your 30 day probationary period and training. As a junior a vehicle is handy, but not required and we do not cover gas for your personal vehicle being driven around as you will be riding with your assigned Master CPE Trainer. In order to qualify as a Senior CPE upon hire you MUST have your own presented. insured truck, SUV, or other capable vehicle that will carry up to a 40 foot extension ladder. You also must know how to terminate Ethernet cat 5e -B standard efficiently with a low failure rate and be able to find and correct any errors when they are made, you must also possess a full set of speed wrenches, sockets, deep sockets, fishing rod, drills, big 12 to 18 inch drill bits for drilling thru structures exterior walls, a small light weight netbook or larger tablet (to access gear) and a used and unlocked mobile phone your not using (We provide the SIM card and do recommend a Dual SIM phone for optimal operation). You must also have a basic understanding of how you get a DirecTV type satellite dish to connect or actual fixed point wireless radio alignment experience. As a senior you’ll also be responsible for speaking with the customers so customer service skills are a must. Starting pay for Senior CPE’s is $16 to $24 per hour depending. A live on the first try bonus is paid to ALL staff. Additionally, once you pass your probationary period, you’ll get free internet.
The most important things you need to understand about this job is we need folks who will CONSISTENTLY arrive at their first job site for the day at 9am SHARP without fail Monday thru Friday. We also work outside on roofs and in ditches out in rural remote areas. It’s consistently hot, for the most part, even in the winter. It gets dirty and at times can be tough. We need rugged guys. Roofers, we can train you to do this from the ground up, so if your out of roofing work, having a basic and strong knowledge of how rooves are built in order to place mounts makes you prime candidates. Don’t be scared off by the fact that this is internet. This is line-of-site and the receivers are will be pre-configured, literally point and shoot, then hook up your cable and your done. Also, we do conduct pretty heavy background checks for obvious reasons. Any injury claims will require a drug test. If you come back dirty, not only will you not be covered for the workman’s comp insurance, but before you can come back to work, you MUST complete a certified drug re-rehabilitation program. We believe in 2nd chances, but that’s all you’ll get. A 2nd drug offense will be an automatic termination.
As we move forward with getting our business professional and getting all our ducks in a row, the management team has decided to switch our phone system provider. Over the next 5 to 7 calendar days as they switch over the ports with our numbers calling may prove difficult. Once the change over is complete however, ALL SMS notifications and our primary phone number will be changing to (512) 790-2250 This will be our permanent phone number moving forward for years to come. After this week any authorized staff that call or SMS you, the caller ID will come from this number and this number alone. If it does not, this is NOT Hyper Fusion communicating with you and you should email scams@hyperfusiontech.com As we grow, we expect that we will start getting hit with some scams. We’ve always got to stay 2 steps ahead of the scammers and spammers.
Standard Communications Procedures Update & Getting Help With Slow Speeds or No connection.
From this point forward Hyper Fusion will no longer be sending out emails of any kind other then courtesy notifications for changes made to your account or new replies made on your support tickets. Our ticket system is our ONLY official form of communication regarding your account. So if you want to upgrade your services, transfer them, terminate them, or any other official change regarding your account it must be done through our ticket system. You can create a new ticket by either logging in to your Fusion Portal online and opening a new ticket or by emailing into support@hyperfusiontech.com Please be sure to ask your question in the body of the email or ticket in your Fusion Portal and limit your subject line to 200 characters or less. If you put a big long giant question in the subject line, our system cuts off everything past 200 characters so we won’t be able to read it and help you as quickly. Please, we ask that all customers focus their communication within our ticket system. Our office manager and Chris will be working very closely together every morning before he heads out into the field to go thru as many tickets as possible to make sure everyone gets speedy customer support.
Additionally, for those customers who are used to speaking to Chris or Will directly for customer support, they will both be training our current support staff and office manager very heavily thru out the week in order to assist you in any questions you may have or help you may need with your account. In order for us to get our field work caught up and every one happy and satisfied they will need to be focusing on field work quite heavily over the next few weeks and will not be available. As Hyper Fusion grows they will need to focus on building the business and ensuring that our network doesn’t get pummeled again by people who don’t know what they are doing and with our new managing and now screening staff much more heavily, its helping us avoid those issues moving forward.
If you recently have had normally working service or at least some service, EMILI, our AI, can help most customers get going again. In our first week she fielded over 500 customer support calls and 200 of those where slow speeds our connection was out and she was able to resolve 70% of those without our interaction so she’s already pretty good. Chris will be teaching her how to do all sorts of things soon including changing WiFi passwords for those of you with our managed router service, being able to interact with EMILI with a Google Home speaker using the Google assistant, check on your bill to see when its due, and all kinds of things, just call ( 512 ) 645-1135 to give it a try. To get a more comprehensive list of questions to ask EMILI with help on, CLICK HERE.
Burnet South Gateway Fiber Upgrade
So we ran into a slight delay with the City of Burnet as this is our first site we’ve ever placed inside city limits that require a master electrician to pull a permit and have the city inspect the site before we can connect up the power. All the other work is completed however and Tuesday we will be digging the power trench on the site and getting the Burnet South fiber spun up. Wednesday night we will be making the change over.
Our Friends 1 / Arrowhead Repair Job
Our entire staff will be out at Our Friends on Wednesday to work on the repeater, boost up the parks WiFi, and permanently repair the arrowhead down-link radio mount structure and replace the line. We will also be working on customer repairs within a 5 km radius of our friends on that day. We ask that if you are a resident or guest in our friends to please email support@hyperfusiontech.com if you would like a booster radio and cube router like the residents with solid service have so we can get everyone trimmed up. Residents and guests of Our Friends 1, are you having troubles using the park wide WiFi or is your other providers internet suddenly slower? CLICK HERE to find out why and how to fix it.
Our Friends 2 / Chica Ranch Repair Job
Friday, bright and early we will be working on raising up the Kempner Main tower at Our Friends 2 another 20 feet and bolstering the up-link connection to Kempner North. This will drastically improve speeds to Chica Ranch and surrounding customers. Additionally we will be installing the beefy park wide WiFi system just like at our Friends 1 at our Friends 2 at the same time. If our field team has time and there are any re-points/fine tunes/repairs with in a 5 km radius of the repeater, the teams will be addressing those customers on Friday.
Burnet Main Re-Structure
On Sat. Sep 21st we will be stripping ALL cables off Burnet Main and most of the access points and changing them out for brand new fresh replacements. Additionally we will be beefing up the tower’s lightning protection system as well as installing a server rack with some specialized web caching and cloud servers to help speed up load times and commonly used and shared internet files, such as that latest release of Stranger Things on Netflix. We are also installing heavy duty lines on the tower to ensure a longer lasting and more stable circuit for everyone since Burnet Main is one of our main distribution towers. (Meaning it connects to at least 3 other repeaters, is directly connected to a fiber-fed tap point, and house’s private circuit links)
7 Creeks / Equrina
We are working as fast and as hard as we can to get 7 Creeks working correctly again. Monday , September 15th, we will be replacing the 7 Creeks backbone link with a brand new pair which should resolve the slow speed issues. Once the Burnet Main Re-Structure is completed though, we will be placing brand new gigabit backbone radios to both 7 Creeks and Equrina which will allow those sites to run at the same power packed speed as Burnet Main and allow for much more stable connections way out there. We will also be activating the 7 Creeks B repeater this month at some point as well.
Briggs Repeater & Fiber DMARC
Tuesday, September 17th we will be installing the Briggs repeater & Fiber DMARC point. This opens up a lot of new area for Hyper Fusion so spread the word. Briggs installs however won’t be happening until mid-November due to the amount of worked we’re backed up with. This repeater should go up nice and fast however, because its just getting an an omni repeater on it so, radio installation will be nice and easy. Good for connections up to 15 km. This repeater site will eventually connect to Liberty Hill where we will add our 3rd fiber provider into our network when the time comes.
Burnet East / 29 East
Everyone that has been waiting for Burnet East and 29 East (10 km east of Burnet on Highway 29) these 2 repeaters we’re going to build at the same time the first week of October, however, other than the existing customers that require these towers to get service, new customers of these locations will have to wait until mid-December to get installed. Again, we are just that backed up with new service requests.
Lampasas / Nix
This week as we get all of the other above work done, we will be taking some scans and surveys of the Lampasas area. We have a couple options from building out Nix and tapping our Lometa fiber, or tapping our Key Ave fiber and building a new repeater site there. We could also increase the height of Lampasas East and accomplish the same thing there. Over the course of this week we will be doing some more surveying to determine the quickest course of action to strengthen up speeds in those areas to get everyone’s needs satisfied. We ask that you bear with us as we get some radios swapped out, and we need to do some work on Lampasas West to get that beefed up, including a new backbone gigabit radio to really beef up that site.
Cottonwood Mesa
We will be working on building out our Cottonwood Mesa repeater and hope to have it fully up and operationally before the month is out. However, we’ve run into a few snags with the sub-division managers and some issues we are working together to resolve. We hope the matter won’t take too long and we can start installing internet for those folks before the month is out.
Hey everyone, we’re making our update post for the coming weekend. Our website and portal will be going up and down this weekend as we conduct upgrades and adding a few new servers into the rack. We know that there are a few folks who got their appointments missed this week due to the Burnet South fiber being installed. If you recently had an appointment set over the last week, your appointment is firmly set and already under our new process and this update does not apply to you. If you were impacted by this, or simply still need your install or repair onsite conducted,
WILL HAS PERSONALLY REQUESTED TO SPEED UP YOUR REQUEST, IF YOU’RE IN NEED OF REPAIR, PLEASE INCLUDE AND ATTACH PHOTOS OF YOUR RADIO AND INSIDE CIRCUIT. IF YOU’RE WAITING ON A NEW INSTALL, PLEASE SNAP SOME PHOTOS OF YOUR ROOF OR ANY UTILITY POLES THAT MAY BE ON YOUR PROPERTY. THIS WILL ALLOW US TO GET VITAL KNOWLEDGE BEFORE HAND SO THAT WE CAN COME OUT ONE TIME AND MAKE SURE WE MAKE THE MARK AND GET YOU LIVE!
Chris and his brother are going to be piling thru tickets all weekend. We have set up this inbox so we can get all these last little remaining jobs cleaned up. Even if you have internet, but are a bit slow, please report it using the email address above. To help our customers still get answers to our questions, Chris has taught Emili some more things she can answer for you, here is a list of questions you can ask Emili to get the information you need. Chris is just about done with the bits of code that will allow Emili to get into your radio and reboot it and run the same processes’ Chris runs to magically fix circuits how ever he does it. So, this should help get most folks instant help instead of waiting.
With our field team being a bit more trained now and it getting cooler we are about to start our big fall field work ramp up schedule. Which means will be working longer in the field and before the month is out we will be extending our phone and web chat support hours back to winter schedule. We are doing MUCH better this week with on-time appointments and everything we have going on. We are currently hitting every one of our appointments without being more than 15 minutes behind. Look at our fiber can, doesn’t it look so pretty?! Remember, that’s the difference folks, we’re the only one who posts photos of us digging and laying fiber across Burnet and Lampasas counties because we are THE ONLY PROVIDER LAYING FIBER that’s a local little company and not big box internet. If you’re not laying your own fiber, then your calling up AT & T and slapping your own sticker on it. Well, we don’t do that. This area needs new fiber!
Now that we have confirmed and located all the customers and the few unauthorized and VERY horribly put together repeaters that the staff that was terminated in June put up without permission and Will has completed the engineering plans to fix it we can get you folks fixed up. Those customers located in the Council Creek / Wolfe Creek area out by Spider Mountain, customers connected to Arrowhead Ranches repeater, and those located east of Burnet that have had their installations or repairs held up more than a month please note that in your request as we will have some sizeable credits coming your way and we have some paperwork we need y’all to fill out so we can recover the funds for these repairs. I know several customers have been really frustrated with the situation, and this will get everyone resolved. As most of you already may know, and hundreds of happy customers can contest to, once Will visits you, you just always have awesome internet after that. Period.
Although we did not cause any of the problems caused by the staff we terminated, we do however feel super bad about what happened, as we started this company to help people get decent internet. With that in mind, anyone still not live that are affected by this, will be getting 100% of any monies paid in credited to their account. Hyper Fusion’s co-founders believe this is the right thing to do. Plus, who can go wrong with free internet? Remember folks, there’s a reason we have a waiting list of over 100 requests for service now. Because our service is by far superior to any other local provider around the Greater Highland Lakes area, and the ONLY pure digital hybrid network for miles around.