Lightning Fast Fiber Internet Construction Beginning in Six Maine Towns

Do you remember life without the Internet? I remember signing onto it for the first time in 1994 using a 2400 baud modem that came in a kit called Internet in a Box. You plugged your phone line into a modem and off you went browsing the World Wide Web which was nearly all text only.

The hosts of the Today show couldn't understand it back then.

Wow, how times have changed. The Internet is now almost as necessary as running water and electricity. It's how we communicate, and what we use in our jobs. It is connected to our homes controlling devices like lights and cameras, and we use it to watch TV now through streaming services. Just last year, for the first time, people watched more content on streaming services than they did on cable TV.

With all that data we're pushing back and forth, we can always use faster speeds and in six Maine towns, construction on a lighting fast fiber internet service is about to begin.

Fidium Fiber announced on Thursday in a press release that they are beginning work to bring multi-gig speed fiber internet service to the towns of Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, North Deering, Scarborough, South Portland, and Westbrook.

Fiber optics are able to transmit data much faster than traditional copper lines. How much faster exactly?

I did a speed test to find out what speeds I was getting on my home internet and came up with these numbers.

121.5 Mpbs down and 10.7 Mbps up aren't terrible numbers, but fiber can do much better with up to 2000 Mbps in both directions.

Another advantage is that your typical copper wire transmission lines are usually shared with your neighbors so they're taking away some of your speed and vice versa. With fiber, you have your own connection so no sharing bandwidth.

So if you live in the towns of Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, North Deering, Scarborough, South Portland, and Westbrook, expect construction of the new fiber network to begin in February.