The fiber drop went in at our place last week. We are now pulling 2 Gbps symmetric to the house through Empire Access, and after eight years of capped upload on cable, the difference is the kind of thing you feel before you measure it.
The bigger story is what made it possible, why it matters to people in Ithaca beyond us, and why a 2 Gig pipe is worth paying for even though nothing in the house has a NIC or WiFi adapter faster than 1 Gbps.
What’s in this post
- Our 30-year road to fiber
- Empire Access lands in Ithaca
- The buildout you don’t see
- ConnectALL is the policy backdrop
- Why New York went with regional providers
- How Ithaca stacks up nationally
- Our hardware behind the fiber
- The 1-Gig NIC paradox
- Who in Ithaca should care
- Where this goes next
Our 30-year road to fiber
The 56k modem handshake is still the sound that defined a generation. That was us in the 90s, sitting in front of a beige tower, listening to the modem negotiate with the ISP, waiting for a web page to paint one row of pixels at a time.
Buffalo got us our first real upgrade. We ran 384k SDSL out of a small apartment, and the symmetric part of that was the magic. We could upload as fast as we could download, which mattered the moment you were trying to publish anything to the web instead of just consume it.
The next jump felt science-fictional. In 2006, Verizon Fios delivered symmetric 1 Gbps to our place in Buffalo. A gigabit, both directions, in 2006. Most of the country would not see that for another decade.
Then we moved to Ithaca in 2018 and downgraded. Spectrum was the realistic option. Gigabit down, sure, but the upload was capped at 40 Mbps. After running symmetric gig, dropping back to a 25-to-1 asymmetric pipe was the kind of step backward you feel every day. Cloud backups crawled. Remote desktop hiccupped. Video calls choked the second something else tried to upload in the background.
We waited eight years for something better. Now it is here.
Empire Access lands in Ithaca
Empire Access is the kind of company that does not get written about much outside of trade press. Founded in 1896 in Prattsburgh, New York. Family-run for most of its history. Acquired in January 2023 by Antin Infrastructure Partners, the French infrastructure investor, in a deal that paired Empire with North Penn Telephone to create a regional FTTH operator with over 1,200 fiber route miles.
They have been pushing into the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes for years. Ithaca is part of the current expansion. Crews are actively installing in homes in Cayuga Heights and northeast Ithaca right now, with the rest of the city expected to follow as the buildout continues. Residential plans are symmetric, no contracts, free install.
Here is what they quoted us at our Ithaca address:
- 1 Gig symmetric at $75/mo
- 2 Gig symmetric at $95/mo
We took the 2 Gig tier. Empire Access does not publish residential pricing on their main site, so your quote may be different from ours. You enter your address at shop.empireaccess.com and they give you the number for your location.
For an extra twenty dollars a month, you get double the throughput and the headroom to add a NAS, more access points, more users, more anything later. That math made sense for us.
The buildout you don’t see
A fiber drop at your house is the tip of a ten-year construction iceberg. Two pieces of that iceberg are worth knowing about, because they are why Empire Access can offer service here at all.
Southern Tier Network. The open-access dark fiber backbone that runs underneath a lot of the Southern Tier broadband market. Southern Tier Network operates roughly 550 miles of fiber across eight counties, including Tompkins. It started as a wholesale dark fiber provider leasing capacity to ISPs like Empire Access, who used STN to expand into Hornell, Bath, Watkins Glen, Corning, and Elmira (CNY Business Journal). After a successful ConnectALL pilot project in Nichols, NY, STN now also offers residential service directly to homes on the same open-access model. The wholesale dark fiber business continues alongside it. Ithaca is the latest county to benefit from the backbone.
ROC Fiber. The Finger Lakes construction outfit on the buildout. The division of labor on our install was specific. Empire Access did the boring to put the underground conduit in. ROC Fiber ran the line from the junction box at the road to the side of our house. Then Empire came back as a separate appointment to mount the ONT inside and light the service. Three crews, two companies, one drop. It is the kind of local industrial choreography that is doing the actual digging while the rest of us watch quietly through the front window and wonder when our turn is coming.
The point of naming both is that a service like Empire’s 2 Gig is the visible layer on top of a multi-party industrial operation. Dark fiber wholesaler, construction contractor, service provider. None of it works without the others, and very little of it would be economical to build out here without the state and federal money flowing in behind it.
ConnectALL is the policy backdrop
That money is real, and it is finally moving. New York State runs its broadband expansion through the ConnectALL Office, which sits inside Empire State Development. The mission, in the state’s own language, is “to build New York State’s digital infrastructure and connect all New Yorkers through the internet.” The active funding stack looks like this:
- $664.6M in federal BEAD dollars for the Deployment Program. NTIA approved the state plan on December 4, 2025. NIST cleared it on January 16, 2026.
- $295.3M in Treasury Capital Projects Fund dollars for the Municipal Infrastructure Program.
- Plus Affordable Housing Connectivity and Digital Equity allocations on top.
A billion dollars and change, aimed at the parts of New York that the private market never got around to wiring. That is the policy reason fiber is reaching places it would not have reached on private investment alone, and it is the reason rural and small-town Southern Tier addresses are getting symmetric fiber at the same time as Ithaca.
The practical timeline: ConnectALL Deployment Program projects are expected to commence in 2026 and have up to four years to complete, which puts the realistic horizon for universal statewide coverage at the end of the decade. By 2030, in other words, the goal is for every address in New York to have a real broadband option. We are watching that play out in our own neighborhood right now.
Why New York went with regional providers
The version of “internet service” most Americans have lived with for the past twenty years was never designed for them. It was designed to deliver content to them. Cable companies built asymmetric networks because the business model assumed you would watch and not produce. Spectrum and Comcast spent decades treating customers as consumers of a one-way pipe, throttling the upstream side because the upstream side did not generate revenue for the cable company.
That design choice had a cost, and most of the cost landed on the people trying to make something. A 4K YouTube upload at home on a 40 Mbps cable line could take twelve hours overnight, and you still had to hope the connection did not glitch and force a restart. Anyone trying to participate in the creator economy from a residential connection in upstate New York knows the feeling. The pipe was the bottleneck, the cable companies knew it, and they kept selling it as “service” while the rest of the world built symmetric fiber.
The promises that were supposed to fix this came and went. Verizon launched Fios with enormous fanfare, took franchise deals from cities and towns across the country, and then in March 2010 ended new Fios expansion. Rural markets got nothing. Most of upstate New York got nothing. New York City sued Verizon for failing to complete the citywide buildout they had committed to, and the 2020 settlement required Verizon to belatedly connect 500,000 additional NYC households. The pattern, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has documented, is that Verizon “has a long history of taking significant taxpayer subsidies in exchange for fiber networks routinely only half delivered.” Charter, the parent of Spectrum, “was almost kicked out of New York State for substandard service and lying to regulators.”
That history is exactly why ConnectALL looks the way it does. The state’s $228M Municipal Infrastructure Program was earmarked as a direct response to the Verizon and Charter failures, designed to fund municipal and regional broadband alternatives rather than throwing more taxpayer money at incumbents who already proved they would not finish the job. The first wave of ConnectALL winners reflects that strategy:
- Dryden Fiber ($8.9M): Town of Dryden, the only municipally owned ISP in New York State.
- Fiberspark (Southern Tier): partner on multiple Municipal Infrastructure projects across eight Southern Tier towns and 223 fiber route miles.
- SLICFiber ($2.4M): Franklin County, through the Development Authority of the North Country.
- Community Broadband Networks ($10.8M): City of Syracuse municipal fiber project.
- CBN America ($121.2M federal plus $40.4M private): April 2026 BEAD award, building fiber across Schuyler, Yates, Chenango, Delaware, Madison, Oswego, and Otsego counties.
None of those names are Verizon, Comcast, or Charter. That is the policy choice. New York looked at the track record and decided this round of public money was not going to incumbents who already collected billions in past subsidies and walked away from the harder buildouts. It would go to operators with roots in the communities they serve, who have something at stake locally.
We are fortunate to live in a state that recognizes the inequality the old one-way model created, and that is willing to fund the alternative.
How Ithaca stacks up nationally
The United States ranks 8th globally for median fixed broadband, at roughly 302 Mbps as of December 2025, per the Ookla Speedtest Global Index. We sit behind Singapore, Chile, the UAE, France, Hong Kong, Iceland, and Macau. We are not in last place, but we are not where you would think a country of our size and wealth would land.
Inside Ithaca, Spectrum still holds about 85% of city addresses per BroadbandNow, with the asymmetric pipe profile we have been complaining about. Fiberspark publishes the cleanest multi-gig pricing in town, at $85/mo for 2 Gig and $150/mo for 5 Gig. Empire Access is the new entrant changing the math for the parts of town they reach.
Our hardware behind the fiber
The point of running 2 Gbps symmetric is the LAN side getting to use it. Here is what we put behind the ONT.
UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber (UCG-Fiber). The router. Designed for multi-gig fiber drops, with SFP+ WAN, so you can connect to the fiber side without an extra media converter in the chain. It will move 2 Gbps without breaking a sweat and has headroom if we ever bump up to a faster tier.
UniFi U7 Pro access point. WiFi 7 (802.11be), tri-band, 2.5 GbE backhaul. The 2.5 GbE uplink is the part that makes it worth running with a multi-gig WAN, because a single AP can now hand out aggregate throughput well above a gigabit across multiple clients in the same room.
UniFi Mini switch. A small managed PoE switch to feed the AP and a couple of wired devices. Compact, quiet, capable.
Cat 5e cabling. Yes, Cat 5e. The cable already in your walls from the last twenty years still does 2.5 GbE on runs up to 100 meters, per the IEEE 802.3bz standard. You do not need to rip out your walls to take advantage of multi-gig WAN. Cat 6 or 6A is nicer if you are running new, but Cat 5e is not the bottleneck it gets made out to be.
The 1-Gig NIC paradox
Here is the question worth answering directly. Why pay for 2 Gbps when nothing in the house has a wired or wireless adapter that goes above 1 Gbps?
Four answers.
Aggregate household throughput. This is the nuance worth understanding clearly. One person downloading a large game or uploading a long video at full tilt can saturate a 1 Gbps line all by themselves. On a 2 Gbps line, that same hardwired 1 Gbps device can only ever consume half the pipe, because the device’s own NIC is the bottleneck. Multi-gig WAN does not make any single device faster. What it does is guarantee that one busy device cannot starve everyone else. Four 4K streams, a cloud backup running in the background, a game patch downloading, a kid on a video call. Each one is fine on a gigabit by itself. Stacked together they choke an asymmetric pipe long before they choke a symmetric 2 Gig one. The point of multi-gig at home is not single-stream speed. It is parallel work without contention.
Symmetric upload changes daily life. Off-site backups to Backblaze or Borgbase. Self-hosted services reachable from outside the house. NAS-to-NAS replication. Large file delivery to clients. Video calls. Eight years of a 40 Mbps cap was the bottleneck on every one of those, and erasing it changes what you can actually do from home.
WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 access points need fast backhaul. A single laptop client may not pull more than 1 Gbps over the air, but a roomful of clients sharing a 2.5 GbE AP backhaul absolutely will. The AP is the multiplexer. The WAN needs to feed it.
Latency and jitter, not raw speed. Fiber is just better at the low end of latency and at controlling jitter than cable is. Video calls and remote desktops feel different on fiber even when the speed-test number looks similar. That is not a marketing claim. It is what you notice on day one.
Who in Ithaca should care
Three audiences are most affected by which side of the upload cliff they are on.
Cornell faculty and staff working from home, moving large datasets, holding video calls all day, remote-desktopping into campus systems.
IT pros and homelab operators running self-hosted services, virtualization clusters, off-site backups, multi-NAS setups, anything that needs to push bytes outbound at scale.
Small business owners and content creators uploading from home, hosting their own services, running cloud-connected operations out of a home office.
The thread connecting all three: they are bottlenecked by upload, not download.
Where this goes next
Empire Access is one of several fiber operators expanding under the ConnectALL push. Dryden Fiber is proving the municipal model works in our county. Spectrum has competitive pressure on the high end for the first time in years. The 30-year arc points one way, and Ithaca is finally on the right side of it.
Setting up your own home network, or thinking about hosting your own services on something you actually control? Get in touch. We do this work.