Marc Ongaro 6/18/25 Marc Ongaro 6/18/25

Redundancy

At Frazier Mountain Internet, we know staying connected matters—especially when the weather turns or disaster strikes. That’s why we’ve built our network to keep running through power outages, snowstorms, and even certain upstream Internet issues.

Power Backup

Our core network is supported by solar, battery, and generator systems. Both of our fiber uplinks—Frazier Park and Pine Mountain Club—have backup power. Our Tecuya Mountain backbone runs off-grid, and most of our access points have solar and/or battery support.

We’re not done. We're adding or upgrading solar and battery at key sites, including the PMC RV Lot towers. We’re also working on better solar monitoring so we can fine-tune performance and stay ahead of problems.

Equipment Redundancy

We keep spare units on hand and backups of all router configs. That includes key infrastructure and customer equipment—radios, routers, the whole stack. For some gear, like our primary border routers, we keep a warm spare ready to go within minutes.

Weather Resistance

Some high-capacity wireless links are more sensitive to weather than others. When needed, we fail over—manually or automatically—to more resilient radios. We're in the process of making all of that automatic so failovers happen without any hiccups during storms.

Internet Failover

We have two fiber uplinks—both using AT&T carrier fiber—on opposite ends of the mountain. The lines run mostly underground, but they’re not invincible.

A couple summers back, fiber between Frazier Park and PMC went down. Because of our design, the PMC Clubhouse stayed online—we rerouted traffic wirelessly through Tecuya and out through our Frazier Park uplink.

Still, as some of you saw last night, if the break happens before our Frazier Park uplink, it can knock out service. In this case, the fiber break was on a long run from Mettler to South Bakersfield, caused by a third-party provider’s mistake

We’re working on solving for that type of failure. The fix involves building a third wireless uplink to Bakersfield from the Linden tank in PMC. That means leasing space, deploying high-end gear, and hardening our backbone to handle it.

It won’t happen overnight—but every upgrade, backup, and failover we put in place moves us closer to one goal: making Frazier Mountain Internet the most reliable provider in these mountains, no matter the conditions.

Marc Ongaro 6/15/25 Marc Ongaro 6/15/25

New Equipment, Better Security, and Needed Repairs

New Equipment, Upgraded Firewalls, and Needed Repairs

Firewall Improvements

Cybersecurity is the practice of identifying attack vectors and hardening systems to block harmful actors from accessing critical data. A big part of this is reducing the attack surface — the parts of your system exposed to the Internet. Think of physical security: even strong windows aren’t ideal if they’re eye-level to a bear.

Last week, we took a major step by updating our core router with much stricter rules for incoming traffic. While every customer has a firewall at home (and those are protected too), the border router now blocks all non-ping* traffic — cutting our network’s attack surface by roughly 95%.

For Public IP customers (like businesses), this won’t affect your usual traffic. But overall, this is a major security gain — making it easier to detect real attacks on Internet-facing systems.

For the tech-savvy: Friday’s outage was caused by a rule that rate-limited ping traffic, making some routes appear unreachable and disrupting our routing. We’ve resolved the issue and implemented stronger change management to improve review before rollout. Since pinging public IPs is considered good etiquette, we’re keeping it enabled.

New Mascot

It started with a surprise visitor under Marc’s chair—a tiny weasel, standing perfectly still like it had just been caught red-pawed. A few days later, we spotted an even smaller one darting near the NOC.

No cables have been chewed. Nothing’s gone missing. And we haven’t found any nests. They just… show up. Quiet. Curious. Cute.

We think they might be good luck.

So here’s the question:
What should we name them?

Send your best name ideas to talk@frazmtn.net—bonus points if it’s network-related.

Solar Plans

During the recent SCE power outage, our team worked hard to keep most customers online. We did lose about 30–40% during the extended downtime, largely due to battery limitations. In some areas, our systems need upgrades to sustain at least 24 hours without power.

To fix this, we’re actively working to solarize our entire fleet, making us fully independent from the grid — and enabling unstoppable Internet service for all customers.

At our Tecuya backbone sites, we already have enough off-grid battery and solar to stay online indefinitely. In fact, it’s been over two years since any power failure at our Tecuya Mountain locations.

Performance Improvements

We recently made a big upgrade behind the scenes to improve performance and reduce strange issues some customers were seeing.

Until now, over 200 customers were all sharing one public IP address — kind of like 200 people trying to squeeze through the same doorway. This caused slowdowns and strange behavior on some websites.

We fixed this by giving smaller groups of customers (about 25–40) their own public IP address. That means less digital traffic jam, better performance, and fewer errors.

For the techies: we were sometimes close to port exhaustion due to overloaded NAT rules. The new setup significantly reduces that bottleneck.

Brand-New Equipment

100+ Mbps

We’re now testing a brand-new batch of high-speed wireless equipment — and it’s a major upgrade. This gear is two generations ahead of what we currently use.

To give you some perspective:

Our strongest existing access points can deliver around 80 Mbps total, shared across up to 40 customers. The new equipment? It can deliver over 400 Mbps — a 5x boost in total speed.

We don’t plan to increase how many customers share each access point, which means much faster speeds per person — we estimate between 50 and 200 Mbps per customer, depending on usage. That’s a big jump.

Even better, this upgrade will improve things like lag and dropped calls, which affect gaming, video chats, and voice services. Most of those problems come from the “last mile” — the final wireless link to your home — and this new technology makes that part far faster and more stable. It’s a 10-year leap forward.

We’re also upgrading key backbone radios with new Wave technology that’s much more resistant to bad weather — helping everyone stay connected, even during storms.

We’ll be reaching out to customers in select areas this summer to try out this next-generation Internet.

Needed Repairs

Last month, we discovered a hardware issue with one of the main access points at our RV Lot site. This caused frequent slowdowns and connection drops for about 100 customers.

Once we traced the problem to that specific access point, we replaced it with a brand-new unit — restoring stability and improving performance in that area.