Fixed Wireless Equipment

Solving the "Down at 3 AM" Problem

Some problems are so annoying, it's worth starting your own equipment company just to solve them.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 15, 2005]

Jim Phalan's first job led directly to the second.

As CTO and co-founder of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Resort Wi-Fi, Phalan contracts for service in remote (picturesque) locations across the Caribbean and the United States.

His biggest problem isn't the weather. "Some of our APs have already survived three hurricanes this year," he says. That's thanks to enclosures and lightning arrestors from his favorite vendor, the Demarc Technology Group.

The problem is the upstream. Many resorts require nothing more than a DSL connection, but such connections are not necessarily "always on". Instead, DSL providers often throttle the bandwidth at ports that are not being used.

Phalan was paying techs across the various resorts $100 to $200 per instance to power cycle modems in the early morning hours. There had to be a better way to do it.

Remote DataCom
Enter Carson City, Nev.-based Remote DataCom, where Phalan is vice president. The company is a collection of engineers. Incorporated four months ago, after a year of research, the company has one product, the Keep Alive Base Unit 800 (KABU 800).

The product is designed to detect when the Internet connection on the modem goes down. It then power cycles the modem, and waits for ten minutes before checking to see that the connection is working. This waiting time gives the modem plenty of time to acquire an IP address and negotiate the connection.

Surely there are already remote reboot boxes on the market?

Phalan demurs. "There is stuff out there that will power cycle your equipment, but you have to do it manually. There's nothing that I know of that will automatically power cycle the equipment. There are even other devices with power over Ethernet ports, but you still have to do it manually."

In the early morning hours, an automatic reboot is critical. Whereas the KABU can get a site up again within 30 minutes, a tech might not even have arrived on site in that time.

The unit relies on a direct power connection to the modem to turn the modem on and off automatically.

The unit has six 10/100 Ethernet ports, weighs approx. 16 ounces, and is 10" x 8" x 2" in size. A rackmount unit is planned for next year.

If demand is forthcoming, Remote DataCom will manufacture a cheaper, simpler one port unit for automatically rebooting residential modems when the Internet connection goes down.

For the moment, the company's target audience is WISPs like Resort Wi-Fi that may need to powercycle modems at numerous geographically disparate locations.

About a dozen KABU units are already in place in the Resort Wi-Fi network. Phalan (obviously biased, but also obviously proud) says that the units pay for themselves in as little as one month of operation.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now, ordered direct, for $695.

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