Andrea Melton:
Hello, Connected Conversations listeners. This episode is going to be a little different as we highlight some of our favorite or most impactful segments from our first few months of the podcast. It's hard to believe we've been going strong since August. We hope you enjoy these segments from the first eight episodes. Here we go.
Welcome to Connected Conversations, the official podcast of Kosciusko Connect. Kosciusko Connect is a subsidiary of Kosciusko REMC. Since 2021, we have been providing lightning fast, reliable, fiber-to-the-home internet service to rural portions of Northern Indiana. On Connected Conversations, we talk about fiber internet, technology, community, and how to navigate the digital world in which we live. I'm your host, Andrea Melton. Thank you for connecting with us today.
Our first clip is from the first episode of Connected Conversations. When we talked with Network Engineer Elias Ward about bandwidth upstream issues that had affected our fiber network and how our team had been working with our upstream provider to diagnose and address the situation.

Elias Ward:
Of a series of events that led to that. Because of that new construction, you work out some bugs and things like that. But there are also... And I've seen this before in my career, where routers will be fine when you first plug them in. And then over time, and it can be as soon as a couple days or weeks or it can be months and years, it starts to have an issue. And I think that's what we were seeing here. So when our upstream provider was cleaning that fiber and they thought that was the issue, they plug it back in, everything looks great. And then about a week later, we start seeing the exact same thing. And I think that's what pushed them to look deeper into their hardware because it was coming up over and over again.

Andrea Melton:
Right. It wasn't the dirty fiber?

Elias Ward:
No, no. In this case, it wasn't the dirty fiber, but that's what made the most sense, which is why they did it. But because we have those secondary connections, and that's the whole point is that we don't rely just on one connection. We've got about 7,000 customers now, and we're not going to rely just on one provider.

Andrea Melton:
I had a great time talking with Fiber Support Specialist Jaden Moneyhun about the ultimate Wi-Fi experience that Kosciusko Connect provides and how he helps our customers resolve common issues every day.
In your experience as a fiber internet support specialist, what are some common challenges customers face with their home networks, and how would our router and app assist in resolving some of those common issues or challenges?

Jaden Moneyhun:
So as a fiber support specialist, the main call I get is people forgetting their Wi-Fi password. It just happens to us all. We got to keep track of so many passwords today.

Andrea Melton:
Very true. Very true.

Jaden Moneyhun:
That sometimes you just forget or lose that little piece of paper that you have stuffed somewhere. And Kosciusko Connect app makes it easy. As long as you log into that account, you can just go into your network and change the password or the name of your network from there.

Andrea Melton:
Okay. One thing that has been eye-opening in my role as a marketing and communication specialist here at Connect is learning about cyber criminals, hackers, and the various types of threats that exist. I knew that cyber security was important, but wow, there are a lot of scenarios that I would not have even fathomed to be possible. Vice President of Marketing and Communications Tara Haack shared a lot of very important information with us.

Tara Haack:
The other one, man-in-the-middle attacks. This is where an attacker basically sits between you and the internet, and they track your activities. For example, you might think you're logging into your email account. It looks almost identical to what the typical login looks like for your email account, but the attacker has secretly directed you to a fake login page so they can steal your credentials.

Andrea Melton:
Wow.

Tara Haack:
The other thing that they can do in a man-in-the middle attack, and this is really disturbing, is they can gain control of video cameras on your network. Like if you have Wi-Fi cameras or your computer's webcam and they can actually watch you or family members and just get a feel for household activity. One really scary thing that was in the news, there was actually an attacker that was talking, I think it was a young child, like a little girl on a Wi-Fi camera.

Andrea Melton:
That is absolutely terrifying...

Tara Haack:
Yes.

Andrea Melton:
...That that would even be possible... with Guardian Protection, it makes it impossible for those types of things to happen.

Tara Haack:
Exactly.

Andrea Melton:
Everyone here at Kosciusko Connect was so excited when we slowly started to expand our fiber network beyond our current member lines. Vice President of Technology and Broadband Curt Barkey joined us to discuss the topic in detail, including the current project going on in Sydney.

Curt Barkey:
Commissioners in the ARPA Committee, me and alongside of lots of other folks here in the office. We took a look at that, did that presentation, and they agreed that that is something that we needed to do. And so we've already actually started that work. We've started with our engineering firm, they were in yesterday, I believe, looking to see what it is that we needed to do. They'll grab address points, they'll grab poles, they'll grab everything that we need to do to do design. And hopefully, by Q2 of 2024, there's about 94 addresses down there that we'll have access to our internet and get folks connected.

Andrea Melton:
Wonderful. I'm sure that those folks in Sydney must be very excited that this is moving forward.

Curt Barkey:
I would be. I mean, going down and servicing some other businesses and going around the county, I don't usually get to the southeast part of the county very often. It's not part of my normal travels. And it's a gorgeous piece of the county down there, and what a great place to... If you want to live rural but still have that small town feel, now you're going to have access to the best internet that the county has to offer. And I would imagine that folks would be super excited to be able to say, "Yeah, I can live rural. I live in a small town, and I have internet just like they have in Chicago."

Andrea Melton:
Yes.

Curt Barkey:
How cool is that?

Andrea Melton:
That is very cool because we use this internet for everything nowadays, just everything.
Planned fiber outages happen every now and then, and our subscribers are affected by these temporary outages. Manager of Broadband Engineering and Operations Rich Cinninger talked with us about the reason for these occasional outages.

Rich Cinninger:
So to speak. What we try to do, and we try to keep it to a minimum. But what we want to do is we want to get ourselves in a situation to where we are notifying our customers that there is going to be a planned outage for maintenance purposes, and at least give them enough notice, especially in today's environment. We want to be very conscientious about the fact that nowadays with online schooling and remote workers now, which seems to be continuing to increase the amount of people that are actually working from home-

Andrea Melton:
Absolutely.

Rich Cinninger:
... and rely on the internet service to be able to do that work. Hopefully, by giving the customers enough of advanced notice, hopefully, they can make arrangements that either they can go into the office that day to work or go to Starbucks or someplace else and make those arrangements. So that's what a planned outage is. And again, we try to keep it to a minimum. But unfortunately, it is just one of those things when you're dealing with a network that sometimes you do have to take the services down.

Andrea Melton:
Absolutely. Planned outages are hopefully infrequent but necessary. They come with the territory. My very small role that I play for those planned outages is that I record the greeting or the voice message that goes out to residents and businesses who are going to have a planned outage. So the team will send me the day and the time, and I send that out, or I record it, and then the team sends it out. So I do know that they are infrequent and that folks are working hard to try to make sure our customers are notified and know that outage is coming up and can plan ahead for it. So I get to see a little bit of that on my end.
Our friend Jaden Moneyhun was so kind to come back into the studio for a second time for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We talked about how to spot threats and protect yourself from increasingly advanced cyberattacks and scammers.
With no interest in divulging anyone's personal information or situation, can you give another example of how something like that might happen and what people should do to spot that when it's happening and protect themselves?

Jaden Moneyhun:
Yeah. So another one that I can think of, this member lost more than six figures. And it was a similar computer scam where they called them up and I believe they were pretending to be Amazon. And they said, "Your Amazon accounts by extension, your credit card has been compromised, and we need to move that money into a safe place." And so what they did was obviously he was scared, and I believe at that point, they were pretending to be either the IRS or the FTC, one of the big important government companies.
Yeah. So he was scared at that point, and he was like, "Well, I need to do something. And these are obviously government workers, they're going to protect me." So they convinced him to move all of his money into some type of online wallet. It's called a Bitcoin wallet, which folks at home don't know what it is. It's basically like a internet bank account that can't be traced. So if you put money in there, it's one of the most untraceable forms of currency we have nowadays. So they basically convinced him to put all that money in that Bitcoin wallet. Since they were on his computer, they basically just changed the password, bam, locked him out, and took all the money out.

Andrea Melton:
Wow. Just gone. And then untraceable?

Jaden Moneyhun:
Yep. It is something that's devastating when he goes into the office because really, when it gets to that point, there's not too much we can do. The best he can do is contact his bank and try to get it reversed before all the funds go through. I believe that one, the member was able to get some of the money back. So thankfully, but...

Andrea Melton:
Good.

Jaden Moneyhun:
Yeah, it's just something that you have to be careful for because a lot of the times it is unfixable once it's done.

Andrea Melton:
Right. That's what makes it really scary to not be able to undo what's already been done. We're talking about people's livelihoods here, their savings.

Jaden Moneyhun:
Yeah, Retirement, saving. Yeah.

Andrea Melton:
Absolutely.

Jaden Moneyhun:
Security.

Andrea Melton:
Tricks internet providers disguise as treats. On Halloween, Curt Barkey returned to help bring to light how some of our big competitors use misleading marketing tactics that might make a customer think they're getting something they're really not.

Curt Barkey:
The cell companies use five. This particular competitor uses 10, and they would use 10 to serve multiple customers. That's the trick that we're just using an incremental number as a big number and folks go, "Ooh, 10 gig. Wow."

Andrea Melton:
Right. When really it is not a reflection of the speed or the power.

Curt Barkey:
Correct. Correct.

Andrea Melton:
Not related at all.

Curt Barkey:
Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, if you want a 10 gig at your house, you're going to pay thousands of dollars a month for something like that. And that's just not feasible for the normal homeowner.

Andrea Melton:
You wanted to show me a commercial that you saw just over the weekend that has to do with this very same topic that we are discussing. So we're going to look at it now. It says, "10G whole home Wi-Fi." And you see the router, and then there's these like light waves that are spreading throughout the house and property. And I think there's also a club beat in the background, like I'm ready to go to the dance club. And then it says, again, in neon lights, "10G whole home Wi-Fi."

Curt Barkey:
Yeah. Pretty impressive, huh?

Andrea Melton:
Yeah. It seems like something I want, right?

Curt Barkey:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. When we're talking about this topic about tricks or treats, and when I saw this and you told me that this was the topic that we were going to be discussing today, this is perfect for that because there is truth in what they say, but there is also not truth in what they say. And to get a little technical, but not too terribly technical. When I first saw that, I was like, "Okay. So this particular company says that you can have 10 gig whole home Wi-Fi. What does that actually mean?" And I think for the regular consumer, they're going to look at that and they're going to say, "Well, I can have 10 gig speeds throughout my home."

Andrea Melton:
Absolutely, that is what that commercial indicates to me. The 10 gigs Wi-Fi in my home.

Curt Barkey:
Yep. And you have to dig deeper on these things, and you have to know what you're talking about. And they're relying on the fact that either A, you're not going to dig deeper, or the average consumer is not going to understand what it is that they're talking about in their ad. And so what it really means is on the back of that device that they are selling is a WAN port. WAN stands for Wide Area Network. And that's what any service provider connects into to give you that connected service inside your home, whether that's through your network with cabling or through Wi-Fi. And so that's where that 10G comes from. In this particular instance, is that device can consume 10 gigs worth of internet service or bandwidth, which here again we talked about earlier, most people aren't going to either need 10 gig like residential customers aren't going to need that. And so that's the issue. So they're saying 10 gig, which is true, but it's not 10 gig Wi-Fi in the home. So the device can consume that, but it's not necessarily propagating that out on the Wi-Fi.

Andrea Melton:
Customer Engagement Specialist Haley Donahue joined us for a deep dive into the many features and functions of the free Kosciusko Connect app. We are all about that app.
With the app, you can also just do an overall pause of your network of the internet. So for example, a holiday dinner, it's time for everyone to sit around and look at each other and have conversation and eat and talk. You can just turn the internet off.

Haley Donahue:
Yes.

Andrea Melton:
Don't even give them the opportunity.

Haley Donahue:
No. Make them talk to each other. So in addition to people, there's also a button called places. I use this one a lot as well, specifically for my kids' room and living room and theater room. So I have put all those devices. We have Roku, so we exclusively use Roku TVs, or Roku devices. So I have them labeled in my Roku app, and then I have them labeled in my Connect app and placed into the correct place on the app. So if I don't want anyone in the theater room, I can turn off those devices in that specific room.

Andrea Melton:
Oh, cool.

Haley Donahue:
So it's just an addition to people.

Andrea Melton:
Wow. There's really a lot of different options between the people and places and things. I wasn't even fully aware.

Haley Donahue:
Yes.

Andrea Melton:
It's been a great first few months of Connected Conversations. We're excited for the next few. A big thank you to my Kosciusko Connect co-workers who help the marketing team bring this podcast and this important information to our subscribers and listeners. And of course, another big thank you to our listeners and our fiber internet subscribers. We appreciate you.

Rich Cinninger:
Many of times, if it's even just an individual outage, we're doing same day service. And if we don't get you back on today, we will most certainly get you back in service the next day. So that's what we're here for. We appreciate all of our customers. We appreciate their business. We know it is a service that they can get elsewhere. We hope that they choose us, and we're going to do everything in our power to keep our customers happy and satisfied. So that we continue to hook up more and more customers.

Andrea Melton:
Happy, satisfied, and connected.

Rich Cinninger:
There you go.

Andrea Melton:
Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Rich. Again, have a great rest of your day.

Rich Cinninger:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Andrea Melton:
You've been listening to Connected Conversations, the official podcast of Kosciusko Connect. From all of us at Kosciusko Connect, thank you for connecting with us today.