Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The 2011 WISPAPALOOZA conference was held in Las Vegas last week. The event is dedicated to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), which are entrepreneurial ventures – often privately funded – with a goal of building a wireless
infrastructure to support broadband internet access to underserved markets. Unlike the traditional telecommunications companies that are slow to market, WISPs are agile organizations that can adapt and roll out services quickly and efficiently.

One of the big announcements at the conference was PowerCloud™ Systems unveiling of its CloudCommand™ OPEN Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The new platform will support access points from the Ubiquiti Networks' Unifi family and the Arada Systems' MaxR family. Ubiquiti, in particular, is one of the growing players in the burgeoning equipment provider market, with plans for an Initial Public Offering.

PowerCloud’s announcement is significant. Ubiquiti Networks and Arada Systems supply affordable hardware that, when combined with the CloudCommand OPEN platform, enables services providers to supply all the tools necessary to operate and manage Wi-Fi networks. More important, the cost is significantly less than the traditional systems.

The established telecommunications companies and government entities that are providing funding need to take notice. One of the key arguments in the debate to close the rural divide has been the cost of establishing networks in remote areas. As WISPs spread, the point becomes moot. And because WISPs are privately funded and adaptable ventures that can provide service at a fraction of the cost, rural broadband no longer becomes a political issue.

Labels: Entrepreneurship, Rural Broadband, SaaS, WISP

posted by Unknown at 4:36 AM Link to this Article  0 Comments

Wednesday, March 24, 2010
My CRM is web-based. My accounting software is web-based. My email marketing tools are web-based. I use Twitter. I use Facebook. I blog (duh). And I love not having to install upgrades, manage a server, secure the data, etc. I love it, that is, so long as I'm connected.

We are entering an era where business cannot function without broadband. No, not just for the speed of ad-hoc transfers such as ftp and email sending and receiving, but for the live streaming connection to business critical data at any given point in time. Imagine the impact of a 50-person call-center, all using an online CRM, and the connection goes down. What's 5-minutes of outage cost that company?

As with every luxury we enjoy, we don't even realize our dependence until we find ourselves without it. My cell phone, for example, is my watch. Really, I stopped wearing a watch when I got a cell phone. Battery dies... I'm nowhere on-time.

The same is true for broadband. A brief outage, even a matter of minutes, halts production. For the increasing number of businesses today resorting to SaaS solutions rather than desktop software, a broadband outage is tantamount to a total system failure. In many situations, the phones go too (especially in a VoIP set-up), and all business-critical activity is put on hold.

And there are going to be far-reaching implications of this shift in software delivery methods. As more and more competitive business software becomes available via broadband, this will preclude rural businesses where broadband is yet unavailable from having any access to the competitive advantages software can offer. The Internet for Everyone organization argues that the gap between have's and have-not's grows today due in part to internet access, and I would agree.

So, what measures can you take to protect your SaaS-dependent company from the turmoil of broadband outage? First, select your service provider carefully. Uptime is almost more important than upstream speeds these days. Second, back-up. No, not data... your connectivity. Having two disparate paths to the web is vital if you don't want those intermittent outages to affect you. And finally, monitor the performance constantly. Don't wait until an outage occurs, notify your service provider of falling signal strength and network "noise" before it causes a bigger problem.

Labels: backup network, Broadband, SaaS

posted by Unknown at 7:14 AM Link to this Article  0 Comments