05/30/2026
Ripple Fiber is coming to the neighborhood. You may have recently received mail from them informing you of that. So that no one is caught off guard or wondering why flags are being placed in their yard, this is your heads up. They have submitted the locate tickets to NC811 for all of the underground utilities in the neighborhood to be marked/flagged in the next week. That means there will likely be multiple people coming through the neighborhood and walking through your front yards to mark all of water/power/cable/phone lines that run through the utility easement at the front of each lot. There will be several different color flags to show exactly which utility line has been located. They may also paint their markings onto the roads and in the grass. Though they *typically* don't paint driveways when marking the distribution lines in an entire neighborhood, that is still a possibility. The flags and paint are there to make sure that current underground utilities aren't damaged when new utilities are installed, so please don't remove the flags until they actually run the fiber into the neighborhood.
You can find locate tickets here:
https://diglogix.com/near-tickets?source=ticket-action¢er=NCOCC
I was informed by Ripple Fiber a few weeks ago that they expect service in our neighborhood to go live mid-summer, so I assume that would be around August.
You can sign up at www.ripplefiber.com. It appears that they recently reduced their pricing so the current offers for our neighborhood are:
650 mbps - $40/month
1 Gig - $55/month
2 Gig - $75/month
5 Gig - $105/month
8 Gig - $135/month
These are symmetrical upload/download speeds, whereas Spectrum currently maxes out upload speeds at 40mbps, regardless of how much you spend.
A brief timeline of what to expect:
-Underground utilities will be flagged/marked.
-A construction crew will begin boring along the sides of the roads and empty conduit will be placed. You will see pieces of orange conduit sticking up out of the ground. Some yards WILL be damaged near the road, though Ripple Fiber is supposed to come back after finishing the neighborhood to restore yards that were damaged.
-The exposed conduits sticking out of the ground will be connected via handhole boxes that are buried completely, except for their access lids. It should look similar to the rectangle cover over your water meter near the road. There probably won't be a handhole box in every single yard, but there will be multiple throughout the neighborhood.
-Fiber will be pulled through the conduit to reach the whole neighborhood.
-Those who sign up for service will have an installation scheduled where a technician from Ripple Fiber will run a "drop" cable from the nearest handhole box to the side of your house. The fiber in the drop will be spliced with one of the fibers that was already run in the neighborhood. The other end of the drop will be terminated in a connection box that will be placed on the side of your house, similar to how Spectrum brings cable into the house now. The technician will then run another fiber from that point into your house, which will connect to a box called an optical network terminal or ONT, which is similar in function to the modem that your cable connects to currently. They'll then run an ethernet cable between the ONT and the router.
-Once the router is set up and they make sure you have a usable internet connection, the technician will leave and the drop outside will remain exposed on top of the ground.
-Someone else will be scheduled to come out and bury the drop at a later date. That will require another locate ticket to mark the lines that are buried in your yard.
This is going to be a multi-month process in the neighborhood, but hopefully it'll provide a reliable alternative to Spectrum, given all of the outages we've had in the past few months. Reach out if you have any issues or questions.
-Matt
