How Cruzio Saved CruzHacks 2025—One Gigabit at a Time

The first day of CruzHacks 2025 was supposed to be all caffeine, creativity, and code. But when our UCSC student team arrived at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium to set up for our beloved 3-day hackathon, they were met with a soul-crushing sight: download speeds crawling at 2–10 Mbps. Not ideal when you're expecting 400+ caffeinated coders to descend with an average of two devices each.

Just weeks ago, the connection clocked in at a solid 20 Mbps—decent enough. But by 3pm, the Civic's WiFi became moody and unreliable. And at 5pm, just as the first attendees were checking in, it flatlined. No signal. No hope. Just spinning wheels of doom.

Enter: Santa Cruz magic.

Doug Erickson made a call to Peggy Dolgenos, co-founder of Cruzio and UCSC alum. Cruzio, Santa Cruz’s first-ever internet provider and current guardian of the county’s fiber optic backbone, answered the call—literally and figuratively.

Within 20 minutes, Cruzio heroes Noel and Xavier rolled in like a SWAT team for bandwidth. They discovered the culprit: old routers that couldn’t handle more than a handful of devices, despite the Civic having access to gigabit fiber. With the calm of seasoned pros and the urgency of a Netflix outage, they replaced all the networking hardware on site.

Result? Speeds rocketed to 100–300 Mbps, up and down.

Device limitations.

Still despite Cruzio’s state-of-the art new routers, some folks were still having trouble connecting. Cruzio and City techs put their heads together: aha! The underlying network had a 250-device cap. You do the math: 400 hackers × 2 devices each = big proble.

That’s when Shannon from the Civic and Carlin from the City of Santa Cruz IT joined the rescue mission. They doubled the mesh network, expanding it from 4 to 8 routers. Problem solved. Hackers happy. The next day, Saturday, when the Hackers were in full hack, and there were still some corners of the cavernous Civic that had limited coverage, Jason from Cruzio prepped another 4 devices and coordinated with Carlin to get them installed

Our Thanks!

We’re beyond grateful to Cruzio, the Civic Auditorium crew, and City of Santa Cruz IT. Without you, CruzHacks 2025 might’ve become CruzCrash 2025.

And just imagine if we’d called a national ISP. We’d still be on hold, navigating a phone tree from 1997.

Moral of the story? When tech disaster strikes, it's good to have hometown heroes on speed dial.