Friday the fifth: fireworks, nice shops and faster internet

Where to party? The Charlotte Symphony plays its annual Patriotic Concert in Village Park on Saturday night, followed by fireworks. Our family has been to this concert several times and it’s always a great time.

Concerts at Village Park, near the corner of Dale Earnhardt Boulevard and West C Street (and West A) in Kannapolis, are a great venue. Bring your own lawn chairs or a blanket.

Harrisburg will begin its festivities on Monday, July 3 and continue on Tuesday, July 4. There will be festivities both days capped off by fireworks. The people of Harrisburg have good live music both nights along with games and activities.

Sister Hazel plays on Monday, while Generation Radio headlines on Tuesday. The park opens at 4pm each day.

Harrisburg Park is the center of the festivities. It is located at 191 Sims Parkway, Harrisburg.

The Kannapolis Cannon Ballers will also celebrate with fireworks after the baseball game at Atrium Health Ball Park on Tuesday, July 4.

The retail carousel at Concord Mills. Many of the stores remain the same at Concord Mills Mall and surrounding malls, but there’s also constant change.

At the Kings Grant pavilion (Concord Mills Boulevard and I-85), BuyBuyBaby is rolling out. The shop had moved into the previous location of BabiesRUs.

A little further down the center, Bath & Body Works and its candle business, White Barn, are moving into space next to Buff City Soap. I don’t know of any timetable on this, but they seem to have a lot of work left. My guess is that Bath & Body Works inside the Concord Mills Mall is relocating, similar to what happened with TJMaxx, which is also now in the pavilion.

Across Concord Mills Boulevard in the Mall, there have been a few changes since we last updated you. I don’t seem to go there very often so some of these changes may be a little dated.

Piazza Nuova is open. The Clothing Store said: Our goal is to put fun into functional fashion

A sign saying Hollister will soon be in a vacant space. Again I don’t have a time frame for this.

The Escape Game is open in the former pizzeria Alino space. This is at the entrance to the mall across from Sun and Ski. Alino still has its headquarters in Mooresville.

The Escape Game features five different escape rooms. I’ve never been to an escape room. Sounds like a fun place to go with a group.

The internet is getting faster. This is what they keep telling us. A company with a local connection is one of the leaders in the industry.

Windstream’s Kinetic will soon be the nation’s largest provider of 8 Gig home Internet. In the coming weeks, Kinetic will have 8Gig speeds available to more households than any other carrier, according to a Windstream press release.

Windstream, a Little Rock, Arkansas company, acquired CTC Communications (formerly The Concord Telephone Company) several years ago.

The 8 Gig service allows for 8,000 megabit service for upload and download. According to the New York Times, the average Internet speed in the United States is 195 megabits per second. We often hear about the speed of the Internet in terms of gigs. A concert is 1,000 megabits, one gigabit.

In July, 330 exchanges across the Kinetic footprint will be able to benefit from the 8Gig service in their homes. This means that over 400,000 households will be able to access this future-proof bandwidth. The company will continue to expand its multi-gig offerings into more markets in the future.

We are very proud to announce that no one else is reaching so many homes with this level of speed, said Clay Fisher, chief marketing officer at Kinetic. We are committed to meeting the needs of our customers both today and in the future.

Multi-Gig speed, delivered over a 100% fiber optic connection, provides 99% reliability and performance for households in the Kinetic footprint. Kinetic 8 Gig Speed ​​Fiber has an upload speed of up to 8,000 Mbps, which is over 220 times faster than the upload speed of wired internet.

We know that homes have more connected devices than ever before, Fisher said. And this will continue to grow. Households will continue to need more bandwidth to run these devices smoothly. Kinetic is the company that looks to the future to give our customers all the bandwidth they need.

I know what you mean. One day I was working on my home router and found that I have 23 different devices connecting at the same time.

The multi-gig service expansion is part of Kinetics’ $2 billion multi-year capital investment to roll out fiber in all of its 18 states. Additionally, the company is forming unique partnerships with cities, counties and other groups to get fiber deeper into the network faster.

More options and the service has improved. In my neighborhood, Spring Hill, we have Windstream and Spectrum (formerly Time Warner), and we should have Google Fiber soon.

Both services have improved a lot several months ago. This was around the time Google started creeping in from Charlotte to Concord.

Warranted technology has improved, but I think the threat of more competition has forced both companies to improve.

While we were talking about Google Fiber, can anyone tell me how they determine where to put those little junction boxes on the street? They put one in front of my neighbors mailbox, just right if anyone accessing the mailbox would drive. Of course it’s broken now and they haven’t started offering the service yet.

From the mailbag. Thanks to our friend Jim Fisher for reminding me to use better addresses and locations when referring to things in the paper. Sometimes I forget that people can’t see what I’m thinking (I sure hope they can’t).

Last week I referred to the under construction Discount Tire store. It’s on Concord Parkway, near Golden Corral. Earlier this week I referenced The Galleries. It is located in the historic Cabarrus County Courthouse on Union Street.

You may have noticed that we do not have an editorial page in the print edition of each issue. There are a couple of reasons: We’ve had a lot of local news and photos, and the secondary reason is that editorial content isn’t as read, at least online (according to our online data).

The editorial page won’t go away, but we will likely continue to use it as a news space more often.

If you have a Friday Five, an idea for a story, or anything I can complain about, please email mmplemmons@independenttribune.com or call or text 704-786-0001.