Hey, Ting Internet customers. We’re going to be rebooting all Ting ZyXel routers overnight as a precaution in light of the FBI and Justice Department flagging VPNFilter malware.

ZyXel routers aren’t believed to be affected by this malware and we haven’t seen any activity on our network that would cause us to think otherwise. All that is to say, no news is good news, but we’re covering all our bases because you can never be too careful.

Your router may be offline for up to five minutes while it reboots, starting at 1am EST. It will reconnect automatically and no intervention is required.

We’re sorry for the trouble. You can find more information on the issue and recommended response here.

Get in touch

If you have any questions about VPNFilter malware or concerns about your hardware, please reach out to our team.

1-844-846-4994

Chat at ting.com/support

Open Access is a section of the Ting blog dedicated to discussions about the open Internet, net neutrality and other important online topics. If you’re already convinced that Internet access should be classified under Title II, Tumblr has a great grassroots campaign on the go. Read on for all the gory details on Title II, common carriage and how we got to the sorry state Internet access is now in.

Common carriers, Title II and Net Neutrality explained

If you care about an Internet that is open to every idea and every startup, you need to know about common carriers and understand what’s at stake as Internet advocates call on the FCC to reclassify the Internet under Title II.

It’s complex. So, I asked Barbara Cherry to help explain it all.

Cherry knows about this from three decades in the field, including in the telecommunications field for almost twenty years–ten of them at AT&T, five at Ameritech, and almost five at the FCC. Now she is a professor of telecommunications who trained as a lawyer and has a Ph.D. in communications studies.

Cherry explains that the idea of common carriage goes back to the Middle Ages. “If your business is to carry things for others, you have certain legal obligations,” she says. Whether you’re a postal service delivering letters or a ferry delivering people, the basic obligation is “to serve upon reasonable request without unreasonable discrimination at a just and reasonable price and with adequate care.”

There are some big ideas in that legalistic formulation.

Comparing wired-in Internet speed to Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi was a total game-changer; no longer was the Internet connection confined to the desk or the reach of an Ethernet cable. Now, whether you’re at home, work or in the local coffee shop, when you access the Internet, chances are good you’re doing so wirelessly.

While the benefits of Wi-Fi are obvious, it has its limitations. The biggest trade-off is Internet speed. If you’re on a gigabit connection, you cannot take full advantage of all the bandwidth that’s available to you on a single Wi-Fi device. The real power of gigabit comes when you have multiple Wi-Fi devices connected to the network with no slowdown whatsoever. That said, for the absolute fastest speeds on a single device (and especially if you’re conducting a speed test to see your maximum throughput) you’ll want to go wired.

If you’ve ever conducted an Internet speed test of your home Wi-Fi and compared it to a wired connection, you’ve seen the difference first-hand. Here’s what’s going on.

It might surprise you to know that today, the main backbone of the Internet in America is fiber. The undersea cables that connect the continents are fiber. Without fiber, the Internet becomes more like the Internot.

So why isn’t fiber to the home (FTTH) more widespread? The fiber gap exists because many ISPs rely on dated copper wiring to connect back to the network. Copper wiring was a purpose-built infrastructure for telephones and later, for cable TV. It wasn’t built with the Internet in mind. It has limited bandwidth, it’s slow relative to fiber and it suffers signal degradation over distances.

The most common question we get about Ting Internet is “when can I get it?” It speaks to the need for infrastructure much faster and more reliable than the old copper networks. Copper simply wasn’t designed to provide Internet access.

While we’d love to get the whole of North America wired (glassed?) up with the access it so sorely needs, it bears mentioning that fiber is a marathon, not a sprint.

As it now seems was inevitable, yesterday the FCC overturned “net neutrality” regulations that were put in place to protect an Open Internet.

Now, Internet service providers – ISPs – will be allowed to prioritize and deprioritize traffic as they see fit. It’s good news for myopic ISPs and their investors but bad news for Internet innovation in North America and, more importantly, for people without choices of ISPs who put their customers first.

Ting’s stance on net neutrality is and will remain unchanged: We will never block, throttle or otherwise interfere with the online activity of our customers.

As a company actively working and investing to build and support fiber networks in Ting towns around the US, we can definitively say that net neutrality had no bearing on our decision to help build the next generation of Internet infrastructure North America so sorely needs. The repeal of net neutrality protections won’t change how we continue this important work, and will not change our continued operation of Ting Internet under the principles of net neutrality.