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When reliability meets affordability, small businesses thrive

An unexpected crisis struck Office Ours just three days after opening their Garner location. The co-working provider's internet went down for 36 hours, leaving their new tenants stranded without connectivity.

"Here we are, a day into the outage, and we still can't get anyone from our internet provider to tell us when it'll be fixed," recalls Ryan Rangel, Office Ours founder and president. "We had maybe 10 people who had just moved in and were paying us rent to provide them a good office environment. I called continuously for all 36 hours and for the whole outage no one could tell me when it would come back online."

That moment made it clear: for small business owners, internet connectivity isn't just a service, it's the lifeline that keeps operations running smoothly. That lifeline needed to be stronger than ever to support 150+ businesses – ranging from massage therapists to counselors to IT startups – across four Raleigh-area locations and one in nearby Sanford, North Carolina.

Office Ours tried two different internet service providers before GFiber. Desiring more reliability, Ryan didn't hesitate to make the switch to GFiber once service was available in Raleigh. The switch brought immediate benefits that went far beyond speed to Office Ours’ four Raleigh-area locations. 

GFiber was a game-changer from the very start, at installation. GFiber didn't just provide one connection per building; they installed individual ports for each office suite, creating all-new flexibility for tenants.

This infrastructure upgrade opened new possibilities for Office Ours' diverse tenant base. Previously, they lost a promising tech startup that needed robust upload speeds for nightly server backups, something their previous service couldn't handle with its limited 20 megabit per second upload capacity.

This flexibility has become a powerful sales tool. "When I'm doing tours and I mention GFiber, people light up a little bit more," Office Ours vice president for sales and marketing Amy Brewer notes.

Beyond the technical capabilities, GFiber's monitoring and support system has impressed the Office Ours team.

"GFiber tells you you're down before you even notice it yourself," Ryan says. "Sometimes they'll have it fixed before you even notice it went down."

The reliability difference is stark. While their previous provider required monthly service calls across their five locations, Ryan can't remember the last time a GFiber technician needed to visit.

Office Ours serves approximately 90-plus businesses with physical offices and 150 total customers including virtual office clients. The company's growth ambitions are equally impressive. They're planning to start the process of doubling in size in 2026, with GFiber expected to be their first call for any new Wake County locations.

"The way any business scales is you have to have the same service at every location," Ryan explains. "Having GFiber as our constant across Wake County locations gives us that consistency."

What sets GFiber apart in the business market isn't just the technology, Ryan shares. It's the approach. While other fiber providers require long-term contracts, GFiber offers month-to-month service even for multi-location businesses like Office Ours.

"GFiber is the most reasonably priced, and you're the only one that doesn't make us sign contracts," he emphasizes. "We’re set up at four locations and don’t require more than month-to-month service."

The Bottom Line for Small Business
For small business owners considering their connectivity options, Ryan’s advice is simple: "It's really about reliability. The moment we moved to GFiber, all those intermittent connectivity issues disappeared."

Office Ours' story demonstrates how the right internet infrastructure can impact not just day-to-day operations, it also supports long-term growth potential. By providing reliable, scalable connectivity without restrictive contracts, GFiber enables small businesses to focus on what they do best: serving their customers and growing their operations.

Posted by Michael Cole, GFiber Head of Sales, East Region.

At GFiber, we’re determined to stay ahead of what’s next, especially when it has the potential to make our customers’ experience better. This year, we rolled out new lifestyle-based internet products to customers across the vast majority of our cities. And last week, we successfully demoed a new capability with Nokia that pushes the boundaries of possibility for the customer experience: network slicing.

TLDR: it gives us the ability to carve up a customer’s home network into different “lanes,” each optimized for a specific use. 

In our GFiber Labs demo, we used gaming as the test scenario. We ran two gaming consoles next to each other and injected congestion into the network with the lab’s traffic generator. Predictably, things fell apart: lag, stuttering, pixelation.* Then we carved out a dedicated lane (a “slice”) in the network that reserved bandwidth just for  gaming traffic. The result: the driving game demo went from jittery and glitchy to smooth and responsive. 

This was a foundational test. And it worked.

In the long-term, this could truly change how home internet works, especially when it’s driven by the customer. Today’s one-size-fits-all connections treat all traffic the same. But we know not everyone uses the internet the same way: gamers care about latency, remote workers need video stability, home businesses rely on solid uptime and security, and, we can see a future where applications (AI, VR, etc.) may require next-level performance. Network slicing could be how we level up network performance.  

Network slicing opens the door to something new: the ability for customers to tailor their connection to the categories of Internet use that matter most in their home. It’s not about prioritizing traffic behind the scenes, it’s about giving you more control, more flexibility, and more ways to get the performance you need, when you need it. And with GFiber, it will always be in service of giving customers more control, without compromising our commitment to an open, unrestricted internet.

There’s also potential for something called “transactional slices.” These would spin up automatically, just for a few seconds, to keep things like financial logins secure. For example, connecting you directly to a service like your bank without routing traffic across the broader internet. You wouldn’t even notice it happening, but it could add meaningful peace of mind.

Network slicing is the next logical step in how we think about GFiber service — especially our lifestyle products like Core, Home, and Edge, built to meet the needs of customers’ unique internet lifestyles. Those products are designed to better match the way people live and work. Network slicing takes that a step further: adding real-time customization and control at the network level.

While we’re very excited about the possibilities here, there are few things that have to happen before we roll out network slicing across our network. Automation is a key piece of the puzzle. We’ll be diving deeper with Nokia later this year to explore how we can bring some of these ideas to life. This kind of innovation is exactly what GFiber Labs was built for and we’re excited about potentially leveling up the GFiber customer experience — again.

Stay tuned.

Posted by Nick Saporito, Head of Product

A year ago, GFiber Labs announced 20 Gig + Wi-Fi 7 at Network X in Paris, and just this summer, we went a step further, testing 50 Gig on our network in Kansas City. As 2024 Network X gets underway, we’re excited to continue our work towards 100 Gig with the publication of a white paper with Ciena on Optimizing Passive Optical Networks with Coherent Innovation. I’d like to say a special thank you to the peer reviewers, as always these types of projects are always a true collaboration and exemplify the kind of work we do at GFiber Labs.  

This paper explores how 100G CPON could potentially future-proof fiber networks with consideration of growing demands for bandwidth and service, discussing the requirements and opportunities to make this technology a reality and to get it widely deployed. GFiber is committed to ensuring that our network anticipates consumer needs and is ready to support increased demand in advance. Understanding and exploring advanced PON technologies is a key piece of delivering on that promise. 

The future of the internet is wildly exciting. GFiber Labs will continue to further the conversation and innovation around what’s next for internet and how we can bring these opportunities to life to make the internet better for everyone. 

Posted by Hani Elmaky, Head of Network Planning & Engineering

When we launched GFiber Labs last fall, we asked some big questions designed to help us meet the audacious goal of figuring out what’s possible for the internet and what tomorrow’s internet experience should be. While we don’t have all the answers, one certainty is that tomorrow’s internet will need to be faster. Which is why GFiber Labs is on a journey to push speeds to 100 Gig and beyond. Delivering 20 Gig symmetrical speeds was the first stop in pursuing that goal, but journeys are made by next steps. And we recently took that step in our hometown of Kansas City.

For the first time ever, GFiber Labs, using Nokia’s technology, tested 50 Gig on a live network. We put Nokia’s 50G PON technology to the test in one of our KC fiber huts (where we house our network equipment):

GFiber’s philosophy when it comes to our network is that all our customers should have access to the latest technology — whether they’re in the first neighborhood we served in Kansas City or in our newest construction areas in our most recently launched city of Omaha and everywhere in between. That’s why we’ve upgraded our network holistically to XGS-PON wherever possible, enabling 8 Gig speeds and above in all our cities. We are already seeing high interest in our multigig products. And it’s why we’re now working to deploy Nokia 25G PON in all of our markets by the end of the year, so that we can extend access to GFiber Lab’s 20 Gig plan. We already have customers putting this new level of service to the test in North Carolina’s Triangle, and we’re adding new customers to the early access program in select markets. 

So when we start testing new technologies, like 50G PON, you know that it’s more than just an experiment or fun stunt for our engineers to geek out over (although, believe me, we did that too!). GFiber sees a future where the internet must meet the demands of increasing users, devices, and bandwidth hungry applications, including immersive video streaming, virtual and augmented reality experiences, artificial intelligence integration into everyday life, and quantum computing. Multigig is already the new norm. But to meet the challenge of this connected future, we are preparing to further densify our network so when bandwidth needs inevitably multiply, we’ll be ready. We are building a state-of-the-art network and we always want to stay ahead of demand when it comes to our infrastructure. 50G PON has the advantage of co-existing with XGS-PON and 25G PON to make the technology transition easier, which may make it the solution for the future.  

These technologies don’t just mean we can deliver benchmark speeds to the home, they ensure our network is reliable and can meet fluctuations in demand. . .say when a certain hometown team goes to that big game in February, EVERY February. GFiber Labs is working to make sure that customers get the experience they deserve at every point of their service — the fastest speeds to the home, using the latest Wi-Fi technology to take advantage of those speed inside and even outside the home, and making sure all of that is supported by a network that fixes problems before they even occur. 

A customer experience that changes the way we think about internet - that’s what GFiber has always strived to deliver, and as internet needs evolve, we aim to continue to meet that challenge for our customers. Testing 50 Gig brings us one step closer to tomorrow. The journey continues.

Posted by Liz Hsu, Senior Director, Product & Billing