What Is an Upstream Internet Provider and How Does It Affect You?

Understanding how your internet service operates can shed light on occasional disruptions and performance issues. Here's an overview of our infrastructure and the broader network landscape that affects your connectivity.​

The Internet is Like a Road Network

Think of the internet like a massive highway system. Your home internet connects to our local network — those are the neighborhood roads. Then, your traffic hits the highway — that’s the regional and national infrastructure built and maintained by large vendors that help you reach sites and services like Hulu, Amazon Prime, or Disney+.

We install and maintain internet lines in our service area. We work hard to ensure our infrastructure is fast, reliable, and constantly improving. But when your data needs to go beyond our local network — like to servers in Dallas or Oklahoma City — it has to travel through national “internet highways” run by providers like Cogent, Lumen, Zayo, and others.

These upstream providers handle the bulk of traffic across the country and connect us to the rest of the internet.

The video below provides a great visual representation of this large infrastructure:

What Happens When There's a “Traffic Jam”

Sometimes, those national lines get damaged — literally. These are usually caused by construction accidents or natural wear and tear.

When a line is cut:

• Internet traffic tries to reroute through different lines.
• Some sites have few or no alternative paths to reach them.
• This causes that traffic to get stuck in an “internet drain” — where traffic gets clogged and stuck, causing sites to load slowly or not at all.

Even after a line is repaired, it can take up to 24 hours for the “internet drain” to clear and traffic to return to normal.

It’s Not as Easy as Flipping a Switch

You might be wondering: Why can’t we just use a different vendor when one has an issue? Great question!

The reality is, not all providers offer routes to all destinations. While we have redundant connections to upstream providers, many national connections only have a single physical route.

What We’re Doing Locally

We’ve invested heavily in local infrastructure redundancy. That means if there’s a local issue — like a fiber cut in Bixby — we can better reroute your data and keep things running smoothly. While no provider can guarantee that outages will never occur, these improvements will help mitigate the frequency and severity of outages.

But once your traffic leaves our network, we depend on national providers, and their redundancy isn’t always guaranteed due to the enormous cost for those providers covering thousands of miles of fiber.

Our upstream providers are continuously working to diversify their networks to reduce single points of failure. This means they’re using multiple fiber paths and routing infrastructure to keep traffic flowing, even if one path is compromised.

When there’s a major outage on the national internet backbone, it affects everyone in the area, not just BTC customers. It’s a shared road, after all.

In Summary:

• BTC handles your local internet connection.
• While no provider can completely guarantee that outages will never occur, we do have redundancy locally.
• Once your data leaves our network, it travels on lines owned by national providers.
• Fiber cuts in major hubs (like Dallas) can cause slowdowns or outages.
• Upstream providers are continuously working on diversifying their networks, but outage-related routing issues do still occur.
• When there are routing issues with our upstream providers, even we can’t fix it immediately.

We hope this gives you a better picture of how your internet service works and why occasional issues can happen — even when everything is working great on our end.

If you have questions or want to learn more about your connection,
give us a call at (918) 366-8000.
We’re always here to help!