Eight Real-Life Ways Fiber Internet Makes a Difference

Student girl in headphones making video call to happy African coach, teacher, tutor, watching learning webinar, blogger online presentation on laptop, writing notes, studying on internet

Just about any of our customers who have already made the switch from older forms of internet (like cable) to fiber broadband will tell you that fiber’s advanced technology is vastly superior to anything else they’ve used.

From downloading files at near-lightspeed, to voluminous amounts of available bandwidth for handling multiple applications simultaneously, to more reliable material components that provide pristine streaming TV and movie experiences, fiber is simply heads-and-shoulders above cable, DSL, and satellite internet.

But those are just technical specs—and that doesn’t tell even half the story! Fiber internet, like the kind delivered by Northern Lights Fiber can genuinely enhance your quality of life in a myriad of ways, including the following eight use cases we’re proud to support.

1. Telehealth Expedites Critical Health Interventions

We begin with everyone’s top priority—keeping their family healthy. And the internet now plays a significant role in delivering healthcare to millions. Telehealth, which allows physicians and other medical professionals to provide initial consultations (and other healthcare) from a patient’s home, has expanded massively in recent years.

Telehealth helps doctors and patients assess when more urgent in-person care is needed (and when it’s not). Prescriptions can get filled faster with telehealth, and consultations over the internet can even assist in properly applying first aid to injuries.

Telehealth consultations can be performed quickly and reliably thanks to fiber’s bounty of bandwidth, which lets audio and video data transfer between doctor and patient seamlessly. Many doctors won’t make a diagnosis when a poor internet connection causes choppy video calls, but that’s not a problem when the patient has fiber!

2. Remote Work Improves Convenience and Productivity

While remote work isn’t for everyone, it can be life-changing for caregivers who need a little more flexibility. Plus, while avoiding the hassles of commutes and traffic delays, remote workers also save money on gasoline and reduce their carbon footprint.

While many workers and employers decide to go fully remote, even partial remote work flexibility can be a blessing. But it takes a particularly robust internet connection to facilitate remote work (especially video conferencing), which isn’t always supported by inferior connections like satellite.

Fiber’s symmetrical downloads and uploads let workers send and receive large files and transmit data during long meetings and conferences, making a remote staff member genuinely feel part of the team!

3. Distance Education Allows Students to Gain Skills and Get Ahead

Access to higher education is more attainable than ever, thanks to the multitude of online distance learning opportunities available through colleges and universities around the country.

From undergraduate and graduate degrees to technical certifications, the internet puts education within reach for many who thought it was impossible or beyond their means, while helping them achieve the skills necessary to meet their career goals.

Fiber internet’s enormous bandwidth facilitates reliable distance learning and even genuine classroom experiences. It allows students and professors to share large files like presentations or lectures in real-time and enables video conferencing to foster learning and growth, including one-on-one student-faculty interactions—all without sweating frequent distortions or outages that frustrate students on older internet technologies.

4. Lifelong Learning Keeps the Mind Active and Engaged

Beyond bringing official degree and certificate programs to students, fiber internet also facilitates a less formal but still highly valued form of education: lifelong learning. Lifelong learning provides opportunities for the curious to understand their world—and even the universe—well after college ends.

Several companies and major universities, such as Wondrium (formerly The Great Courses), edX, Harvard, and Yale have developed extensive online course offerings. You can find classes from prestigious professors spanning topics like ancient Greek history, Renaissance art, classical music, modern astronomy, and more.

And many courses are available free of charge! Through fiber’s near-lightspeed downloading, these courses can be streamed and enjoyed right from your home.

5. Virtual Reality Lets You Explore the World from Home

Fiber’s hefty bandwidth and vigorous download speeds also brings the wonder of Virtual Reality to your home—and with it, the travel experiences many have only dreamed about! Unlike traditional forms of entertainment, VR’s wonderous technology envelopes a user in multiple dimensions of visual and sound effects.

VR—through fiber internet—makes viewers literally feel like they’re wherever VR is showing them, whether it’s a tour of the Grand Canyon or an Amazon rainforest, an astronaut’s view from outer space, or a sonorous symphony hall.

Fiber’s speed and bandwidth combined with VR technology allows you to explore Paris’ Louvre Museum one day, and the Colosseum in Rome the next without ever leaving your living room!

6. Smart Homes Save Energy, Time, and Money

Fiber internet and its spectacular speeds and enormous bandwidth capacities make it possible to power a genuine smart home—a place brimming with tech and devices to cut energy usage and costs and make life better and more efficient.

From smart refrigerators that let you know when it’s time to get a new gallon of milk, to smart lighting that cuts off when you leave home, to smart speakers playing music (or soundscapes) throughout every room, smart home technology can turn your dwelling into the home of your dreams.

Remember that fiber can keep these devices and smart home features running smoothly, while still letting you stream TV and movies, upload videos, and enjoy everything else about your internet. Unlike other forms of internet, with fiber, you’re not forced to choose which online activity to sacrifice at any given time!

7. Smart Home Security Makes for Safer Homes and Neighborhoods

One smart home feature everyone should take advantage of is improved real-time safety and security delivered by smart lighting, smart cameras, smart doorbells and related tech. Fiber-powered devices can monitor your home for security threats at all times, whether you’re tucked in your own bed upstairs or thousands of miles away on vacation.

Additionally, outdoor smart lighting and doorbell systems help make your neighborhood safer too, deterring “porch pirates” and other crime. Fiber has the power to keep these crucial smart home safety and security systems running strong while still allowing you to stay productive and engaged in other online activities simultaneously.

8. Video Calling Keeps You Connected Face-to-Face

Lastly, fiber’s impressive speeds and incredible bandwidth make video calling crystal clear and convenient. Grandparents can easily have face-to-face conversations with their grandchildren, and both sides of the call can see faces as well as hear voices.

Video calling is simply a much more intimate way to stay in touch than by phoning or emailing. And fiber enables this improved communication without the distortions and interruptions that plague other types of internet.

The eight examples above are just a small sample of the way fiber internet’s innovative technology enhances your life. From practical matters like health, work, and security, to broadening your worldview and sharing knowledge and world cultures, fiber can improve your well-being, inspire your mind, and uplift you.

To learn additional ways that Northern Lights Fiber’s service can make a real difference in your life, follow our social pages!

The Summer Slowdown: 4 Tip to Prepare Your Home for Summer Internet

The Summer Slowdown: 4 Tip to Prepare Your Home for Summer Internet

The summer television viewing season isn’t what it used to be.

Once known for endless reruns and launches of shows that studios deemed less likely to be successful, the world of streaming entertainment and the production houses it created are churning out phenomenal content you’ve just got to see.
The trouble is, lots of other people want to watch it too! And quite often, they’re streaming at the same time as you. And with kids out of school for the summer and many people heading indoors to escape the heat, internet usage increases during the dog days of summer. Unfortunately, along with the increased demand, streaming picture quality and overall reliability often decline, frequently turning what should be a relaxing evening into a frustrating experience.

So what can you do to prepare for all of this increased demand? Or maybe you’re worried about the amount of time your kids are on the screen? Or are you doomed to suffer repeated buffering, pixelation, and loading errors during the summer slowdown?

Tip #1: Upgrade to Fiber Internet

Fiber Internet in Grande Cache


The single best thing you can do to improve your internet speed and connection is to upgrade to fiber internet. A technological wonder, fiber internet utilizes fiber-optic cables composed of ultra-thin, tiny strands of glass and other materials that transmit internet data near the speed of light.

As a result, fiber internet’s speeds exceed cable internet, which uses older technology and copper-based materials that cannot compete with fiber’s highest speeds.

Getting a dedicated fiber internet line through Northern Lights Fiber directly to your home means you no longer have to share bandwidth with your neighbors.

Since many in your community are already customers of ours, you may need to move to Tip#2.

Tip #2: Select the Bandwidth to Meet Your Family’s Needs

Once you’ve upgraded to fiber, talk to customer service at Northern Lights about which level of broadband you need.
This will vary from household to household, we can help you determine what will provide the proper amount of bandwidth. If you have multiple people in your home, work from home during the summer, or want to use technology to the max (i.e. security cameras), be sure to choose a plan that offers enough bandwidth for the whole family to use it simultaneously.
This tip will help keep the high-speed internet flowing into your home and devices and help keep the peace in your family!

Tip #3: Use the Northern WiFi App

Now that you have a perfect fiber internet plan for your needs, you should consider using our Northern WiFi App. This is the free App that many of you already have. In a few simple clicks, you can easily:


• Reset your password or SSID
• Run bandwidth tests
• Approve connected devices to use the internet
• Create guest networks (so your in-laws don’t use all your internet)!


Tip #4: Sign Up for our ExperienceIQ and ProtectIQ add-ons

The ProtectIQ and ExperienceIQ functions are not only affordable, but it will give you peace of mind on how the internet is used in your home. We want to deliver the best and safest experience possible!


ProtectIQ is an anti-virus and anti-malware software that is embedded in the WiFi router. This means that every device connected to your network is protected, giving you peace of mind. With protect IQ, you’ll receive


• Malicious website protection, anti-virus and anti-ransomeware packet inspection, and intrusion detection
• Monitoring that automatically blocks anything that looks suspicious coming into your home
• A dashboard that demonstrates how this service is working in your home

Our ExperienceIQ add on allows you to manage screen time in your home, right down to the individual device. You can even filter out YouTube content, ensuring that individual family members watch age appropriate content
Keep in mind that this is much more than limiting or even policing content your kids may use. Parental controls let you prevent your children from using online devices during certain times of day or night, which both reduce their screen time (something all parents aim to do) and increases the amount of bandwidth for you to enjoy!


Many of our Northern Lights Fiber customers have already signed up for ExperienceIQ. So if you want a tutorial on how to use it, please contact us!

By implementing these tips, you can significantly improve the picture quality and reliability of your streaming experience, even with the increased internet demand and higher usage of the summer. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a summer of streaming!

And for more helpful tips on improving your internet experience, Northern Lights Fiber’s social pages!

Five Websites Every Work-From-Home Employee Should Check Out

Five Websites Every Work-From-Home Employee Should Check Out

Over the past several years, the remote working and work-from-home movement has boomed. Even before the global COVID-19 pandemic forced millions to work out of their homes, more and more employees were making the switch from the commute-and-office lifestyle to the improved flexibility of remote work. It is estimated that 25% of all professional jobs could be remote by the end of 2022, with the numbers only building upward from there.

As the work-from-home trend gathers steam and more people enjoy the conveniences of remote working, innovative ways to increase productivity and improve staff connectivity and team-building are growing, too.

And with the reliable high-speed fiber internet delivered by Northern Lights Fiber and Canadian Fiber Optics, work-from-home employees can be confident that their internet will support their careers just as well as if they were in an office complex.

So how can you maximize your work-from-home efficiency? And what online tools and applications are available to improve your remote work experience?

Below we present several websites and applications that may help any remote work employee make the most of their at-home workspace and environment.

Brain.fm

To help fill up the silence that can build up over the course of a work-from-home day, Brain.fm provides unique music and soundscapes to play in the background as you work away. But Brain.fm is more than just a streaming radio station or playlist. It utilizes neuroscience for its offerings to facilitate more concentration, focus, and even stimulation, so you can keep working productively while you’re on your own.

Evernote

Evernote takes the seemingly mundane tasks of note-taking and scheduling to savvy new heights. Its innovative document search and organization features greatly improve efficiency and the quality of your drafting. More than just a productivity or project management app, Evernote is loaded with features that connect you to fellow app-users and facilitate and maintain teams to help keep everyone on task and on time!

OmniFocus

With its sleek interface and powerful features, OmniFocus breaks new ground in task management and team organization software. We’re most impressed with OmniFocus’s cool to-do list, which helps keep you focused on your progress (and detects delays) for your most time-sensitive tasks at hand. OmniFocus also keeps you connected across all of your devices (both Windows and Apple products), as well as to your fellow team members from wherever they happen to be working.

We Work Remotely

There are numerous websites that help remote workers find jobs, and you can and should search through many of them for your next gig or career move. But we believe We Work Remotely (WWR) stands out for its enormous jobs posting board (around 25,000 all-remote job listings!) and its connections to some of the pioneers of the work-from-home movement. Job seekers can create a free account to access all of WWR’s listings, which are conveniently broken down into many categories of remote work—a feature that makes searching for new jobs much easier.

One thing we know for certain: the work-from-home trend is here to stay. So be sure to check out the above apps, programs, and websites to see how you can make your remote working experience even better.

And for additional tips on being more productive while working remotely, follow Canadian Fiber Optics and Northern Lights Fiber on our social pages!