Friday, February 22, 2008

From country road to Internet Autobahn

In my impatience, I went with what I knew about internet connectivity for the new office. T1s right? (for those of you that aren't techies - a T1 is the telephone company's old standard for data lines for corps )

However, we are starting to do quite abit of hosting - the Computing Cloud (V-Cloud) effort seems to have some legs. Well, our ISP of choice was Covad. Covad was offering 2 bonded T1s @ 3Mb/s for $679/month. I was excited at first - their sales rep was very knowledgeable and helpful (super great guy actually) and they seemed to get things moving quickly.

Then the sequence of events went down hill quickly. AT&T runs the line from their facility to the office location phone room. AT&T can't seem to get it right. Covad also didn't deliver the router and their service tech was less than helpful. So it has already been 3 weeks and probably another 2-3 weeks for either party to get it right.

What to do... What to do... How about some out-of-the-box thinking? Actually, one of the Venturality team members (Jitesh) said a group that he knows of just installed 10Mb/s in the loop for $900/month. So I started searching again and found a fixed wireless provider, TowerStream, that can do 8Mb/s for $999/month! The best part is that Venturality is in the coverage area. (picture me doing the "running man" for excitement). The service is scalable to 100Mb/s and can be installed in days not months.

Well before I get too excited, lets see if they deliver. They will be out for a site survey today to see if we are in the line of site with the Hancock building.

I will keep you posted!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I posted a link to this blog at the Towerstream discussion group at finance.yahoo.com
There will be plenty to people interested in seeing how you made out.