News and Events

You might wonder how it’s possible (and why it’s necessary) that we’re continually enhancing your download speeds, upload speeds and overall reliability. It starts with understanding some internet basics, which we cover here, and then understanding Midco’s upgrade strategy, which we cover in Part 2. 

Key Terms and Definitions

You’ll need a basic understanding of the inner workings of the internet before we jump into updates and upgrades. Here are some terms and definitions with which you need to be familiar. 

How quickly information (data) is retrieved from the internet. 

The most obvious example is downloading a movie, TV show or book, but the most common example of download speed is how quickly the contents of a page displays when you type in a URL. Twenty years ago, we had to wait a few minutes for a site or file to load. Today, if there is any delay – even seconds – we quickly become irritated. 

How quickly information (data) is sent to the internet.

A good example is when uploading a video to TikTok or YouTube. A more common example is when you sign into a meeting on Zoom or Microsoft Teams: when you talk, your message must be uploaded to the internet and then downloaded to the other meeting participants’ devices. Imagine everyone’s frustration if your upload speed was anything less than lightning fast. 

The metric for uptime – or, in laymen’s terms, how often you can get to the internet when you want and need to.

There is no service in the world that is 100% reliable because we don’t live in a vacuum. But with today’s technology, a reliability rate under 99.999% will have users switching carriers in no time. 

The amount of time it takes for data to go from its origination point to its destination. 

Let’s go back to our Zoom videoconference. When you speak, latency is how long it takes for your video and audio to go from your device to the recipient’s device. And get this – a latency of 50 milliseconds (less than a tenth of a second) is unacceptable. That’s right, we measure latency in milliseconds!  

Changes in latency.

This means that if the latency is sometimes 20 milliseconds and sometimes 50 milliseconds, there is a high (and unacceptable) jitter rate. In other words, it’s not enough that our latency is 20 milliseconds – it needs to be 20 milliseconds consistently. It seems incomprehensible that end users would even notice a latency variation of mere milliseconds, but that’s the standard to which internet service providers like Midco are held. After all, if you’re on a videoconference or partaking in online gaming, high latency and jitter will drive you nuts. 

The connecting point among network devices. 

This is where most of the “magic” happens when it comes to your internet experience. Fiber nodes convert optical light signals that travel from Midco’s transmission platform to our nodes, where these light waves are converted to high-frequency radio waves (HFs) for further transmission over coax cable directly to your modem, thereby enabling traffic to be routed more efficiently. Sounds complicated, right? Well, let’s cover a few more definitions and then try to sum it all up with an analogy that may uncomplicate it. 

Increase the amplitude – and thus the strength and distance – of the signals being transmitted to and from a node. 

Amplifiers (or ‘amps’) – including the ones you see on stage at concerts – are called amps because they increase the amplitude of the signals, making them louder and stronger, which in turn allows them to go further. Connect the dots on those HFs from the nodes and you can see where your uploads and downloads are happening more efficiently thanks to amplifiers.     

A collection of end users assigned to each node. 

The industry average service group is approximately 500 users per node. At Midco, we strive for 125-user service groups. Why? Each node has a finite volume of data capacity, so fewer users mean more capacity to share. A simple comparison of 125 to 500 tells the story of our capabilities.     

How crowded your network is.

If everyone in your neighborhood is on the same node and you’re all on videoconferences at the same time, the congestion will impact speeds, latency and jitter, among other performance metrics. We avoid network congestion by limiting the size of our service groups. 

A way of controlling network traffic. 

Think of the internet as a 10-lane interstate freeway – one direction is the traffic from your modem up to Midco and the other direction is the traffic from Midco down to your modem. The two directions are separated by a median. Under normal circumstances, we might use eight of those lanes to “go down” (from Midco to you) and just two lanes to “go up” (from your modem to Midco). Splitting is when we move the median so that, for example, there are just six lanes going down and four going up. We use terms like “mid-split” and “high-split” to represent increasing per-second upload speeds. In other words (and in the simplest terms), we employ mid-splits and high-splits in order to allocate more of our spectrum to uploading. Midco most often does this proactively as part of our intricate network planning.  

How It All Works Together: Planes, Not Trains and Automobiles  

Conceptually, let’s think of the entire process as planes and automobiles (with apologies 1980s movie fans, trains just don’t quite work in this analogy). Let’s say you’re at the airport in Sioux Falls, SD, with the goal of getting to your home in the suburbs of Minneapolis, MN. 

• The Sioux Falls airport (FSD) is the service hub where your signal originates 
• The Minneapolis/St. Paul airport (MSP) is the Midco node nearest to your home 
• Your home is, well, the modem in your suburban Minneapolis house 

Your plane trip from FSD to MSP – the first 95% of your trip – is like the Midco fiber cable that runs from one of our service hubs to our nearest-to-your-home node. Then, once you land at MSP, you jump in a car to get to your house – that last stretch of the trip is analogous to Midco’s HF network. Remember from earlier that light waves are converted to HF for further transmission over the coax cable that runs directly to your modem within the node. 

In this analogy, the plane (the fiber) is doing the heavy lifting, covering 90%+ of the trip at extraordinary speeds. But the trip to your house (the modem) can’t be completed without the car (the HF network), which is plenty fast to get the job done. We could even extend the analogy to say that amps are the freeways around Minneapolis, and any tiny amount of latency or jitter results from the pothole-filled side roads that get you to your driveway.   

So, now you hopefully have a sufficiently broad understanding of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the internet to be able to make sense of Midco’s upgrade strategy and learn why we’re constantly providing updates – which we cover in Part 2.