can go up to 200 megabites per second, depending on the
number of copper pairs available and the distance from the
Central office,” she said.
For homes and businesses that can’t get DSL or Cable, SVI
offers a wireless service, called Nitro. “Nitro is a reliable alter-
native to satellite. It has two services: a 30Mbps/3Mbps and a
50Mbps/5Mbps for a flat monthly fee. Homes and businesses
must have a direct line-of-sight to one of our antennas scat-
tered throughout South Santa Clara and San Benito counties.
And an antenna the size of a small satellite dish, or smaller, is
attached to their building to receive the signal,” Elise said.
“The current infrastructure in the industry is copper
wiring. It’s old, slow, and not well-maintained by the big
providers,” she said. So, SVI is creating their own infrastruc-
ture, breaking new ground, literally. Once complete, they
will have buried over 23 miles of fiber optic cable, to create
a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network that will provide many
residents in the Paradise Valley area with up to 1-gigabit
transmission speeds both up and down. Fiber optics enables
transmission over longer distances at much faster speeds and
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
provide higher download and upload speeds with greater
reliability. “When we come to your neighborhood, sign up,
its super-fast and you will like it!”
From their garlic.com domain name and @garlic.com
email tag, SVI is South County: born and raised. Their long-
term plan is to provide high-speed communications to the
areas that the big providers won’t touch. “There’s a lot going
on in the telecom industry that people don’t know about,”
Elise said. “It’s very competitive, but we are smart and more
agile than the big boys.”
In 1994, the World Wide Web was a kind of novelty, most
people were amused by it, it was fun to play with, and email
was absurd—why email when we could just make a phone
call? Today, with smart phones, streaming services, search
engines, apps, and a website for every interest, we can hardly
live without it. Bob Brentnall recognized the potential of the
WWW early on, so he created SVI. For twenty-five years, SVI
has worked to provide the best internet services possible for
their neighbors, and now, they are poised to push us forward
into a new era of internet accessibility.
WINTER 2020
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