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If you’ve driven down the Old Mission Peninsula roads lately, you know that AcenTek is busy installing new fiber to every house within its service area, regardless of whether you are an AcenTek customer or not.
AcenTek, previously known as Ace Telephone (and before that, Peninsula Telephone Company), has been providing voice, video and Internet service to the Old Mission Peninsula since 1982. Now, 37 years later, AcenTek is upgrading the OMP community to fiber.
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The upgrade, provided at no cost to customers, replaces the copper cabling with fiber optics, giving customers faster Internet speeds and access to more services.
Phase One of the OMP fiber project, which includes about 245 homes in the the Bowers Harbor area, Center Road around Mapleton, and north Peninsula Drive area, was completed in 2018.
AcenTek is currently working on Phase Two, which includes Peninsula Drive, Bluff Road, Boursaw Road, and a bit of Smokey Hollow, which they expect to finish in October.
If you are not an AcenTek customer and would like the fiber to run to your home, now is the time to do it, because it’s free. If you wait until later, there will be a cost to run it to your home.
It’s been our experience on Bluff Road that the utility crews have been great to work with. We live high up on a bluff, and it was fascinating to watch the logistics of the machinery that bored a line into our bank at the bottom of the driveway and then see it pop up near our house at the top of the hill.
Here’s a short video of the cable hooked up to the machine and pulled back through to the bottom of the bank (and a view of our beautiful blight – we were in the process of folding up a plastic tarp).
Our neighbors down the road, Jim and MaryAnn Linsell, also had a great experience working with them. At the start of the project, they wondered what the impact would be on homes and properties along Bluff Road, but have only good things to say about it.
“John DeVol [from AcenTek] stopped by this morning to inspect where the new line will enter our house, and I told him to compliment the crew on their prompt, friendly work,” said Jim.
“They found a huge rock in their way in our lawn, moved it to under a tree, and had it all reseeded in a week. Yesterday, they dug up a mulched bed next to the house and you wouldn’t know it from looking at it today. Kudos to Acentek!”
AcenTek is located at 14909 Peninsula Drive on the Old Mission Peninsula. If you have any questions about the fiber project or cost of signing up, visit their website or feel free to call them at (231) 223-4211.
SUPPORT YOUR INDEPENDENT LOCAL NEWSPAPER: I started Old Mission Gazette in 2015 because I felt a calling to provide the Old Mission Peninsula community with local news. After decades of writing for newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, I really just wanted to write about my own community where I grew up on a cherry farm and raised my own family. So I started my own newspaper.
Because Old Mission Gazette is a "Reader Supported Newspaper" -- meaning it exists because of your financial support -- I hope you'll consider tossing a few bucks our way if I mention your event, your business, your organization or your news item, or if you simply love reading about what's happening on the OMP. In a time when local news is becoming a thing of the past, supporting an independent community newspaper is more important now than ever. Thank you so much for your support! -Jane Boursaw, Editor/Publisher, Old Mission Gazette
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[…] While AcenTek was installing fiber along Bluff Road last summer, we learned that they would run the line up our hill at no cost if we did it then. If we waited until later, we’d have to pay for the line to come to our house. Because I had an inkling that we’d switch sooner or later, and because our hill is used as a training run for the Olympics luge team, we decided to have them bring it up the hill. It was pretty fascinating to watch – read more about it here. […]