If you’re fortunate enough to skate through a severe weather event like a hurricane, tornado or ice storm without damage to your home or property, you may find that having a gassed-up generator isn’t enough to get your household back to normal. When bad weather strikes, you’re likely to lose your internet, too.

Internet service has become as essential to our daily lives as electricity. In the early days of the internet, cable and DSL lines were enough to handle your household’s needs. But now, with a dozen or more connected devices in the average home—smart phones, streaming devices and more—those same lines struggle to keep up. It’s even worse when the weather gets rough.

But there’s an answer, and its name is fiber. Weather has a much harder time affecting fiber internet than any other kind. Here’s why.

Copper is only valuable at the scrap yard.
For legacy internet services like cable and DSL, copper is still king. But it’s nearly worthless as an internet conduit. To be fair, it was never meant to carry large amounts of data at high speeds. Copper-loaded DSL tops out at 45 Mbps and cable can only muster 100 Mbps, while fiber can easily handle a Gigabit or more.

The reason is simple: Fiber transmits data as light, meaning it travels at the speed of light. Copper does the same work through electricity, which is slower and makes it hotter than salvaged plumbing and conduit. That heat causes the wire to wear out. Fiber wins.

Flying in your internet is unreliable.
If you’re experiencing internet outages due to weather, it’s likely due to your internet being connected to your home by fragile copper lines strung along utility poles. And somewhere back in the miles and miles of utility poles, a tree limb fell across the lines and caused an epic outage downstream, all the way to your home.

Time to get blunt. Some internet providers—including some who sell fiber internet—are more focused on getting the job done than getting it done right. That’s how your internet connection ends up strung along utility poles to begin with. At C Spire, we bore holes and run fiber lines underground to keep them safe from inclement weather. Proper preparation is the not-so-secret solution to giving your internet signal, and your sanity, some much-needed relief in bad weather.

Before severe weather strikes, check your address here for access to fiber internet.