Providence is thrilled to announce that our campus is now connected to fiber optic Internet.
“We’re really excited to finally bring fiber optics to our campus. We’ve been looking at ways to improve students’ digital experience for many years, and this new underground fiber optics line will give us fast and reliable Internet service no matter what the weather conditions are outside,” says Heath Holden, Providence’s VP Administration and CFO. “This new fiber optics line has huge capacity. It will allow us to keep up with future needs as new technologies develop.”
Valley Fiber Ltd., a locally owned and operated technology firm based out of Winkler, MB, partnered with Providence in 2019 and began trenching on-campus to lay down fiber optic cable last spring/summer. Now, at the start of 2020, our campus connection is running and fully operational.
Valley Fiber is deploying high count fiber optic cables throughout all of its service area which will currently allow for speeds of up to 450 Gigabits per second (Gbps).
Providence’s IT department says we’ll begin to notice immediate benefits. “Our connection speed is twice as fast. Our connection will not be damaged by frost or affected by precipitation. The performance of video and voice conferencing applications like Zoom will improve due to lower latency,*” commented Fred Wiens, Senior Network Administrator.
Modern fiber optics is rapidly reaching new speeds and new markets. Here at Providence, we’re pleased to be among the new communities and small businesses in this region who are now positioned to benefit from its technology.
*Latency is a measure of how many milliseconds it takes to send a request and get a response.
