Doing a Lot

Multifunction appliances have aided this WISP in unexpected ways, and also solved the problems they were bought to solve.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 13, 2007]

When a manufacturer puts you in touch with their favorite customer, you expect a rave review, but you don't always get the details. When we realized that Hod Hasharon, Israel-based bandwidth control equipment provider Allot had put us in touch with the cofounder and network designer of Los Angeles, Calif.-based WISP and VoIP provider Color Broadband, Sean LeMons, we were very pleased, and he was able to talk about some fascinating network issues he's experienced since the founding of the company in 2002.

"We started with just internet," said LeMons. "We were using Trango radios. The issue we had was that we had to adjust the bandwidth on the radios to prevent it from maxing out or weird things would happen, radios could disappear."

So to avoid a Wi-Fi twilight zone that's familiar to many other WISPs, he would send techs out to fix issues and throttle bandwidth down on the radios. Customers might have other issues familiar to all WISPs, such as bot infections or rogue Kazaa users, even in a business environment. In any case, sending a tech out to fix the problem was no fun. "This is LA, where 20 miles can be a one hour drive!"

"Often, they were flooding their own network and we'd use a traffic sniffer and show them they needed to buy bandwidth or turn off something," said LeMons.

Now the process is much easier: just look at the Allot box and you can see what's wrong.

"Just the other day a company complained that their connection was going down every day at 3 PM. After some investigation, we found they had installed automatic backup software that kicked in every day at 3 PM. So we used the Allot box to give that application 512 Kbps of their connection during the daytime and recommended they schedule the backups at midnight. So now we're heroes instead of villains."

Color Broadband started out with an Allot AC-402 box. The company recently expanded into Orange County through an acquisition and a buildout and now has a redundant pair of Allot AC-1010 boxes, one at One Wilshire in LA and at the data center in Orange County. If one of the two fails, traffic is redirected over the company's fiber and wireless backbone to the other box. Under normal circumstances, the box in LA is the main box and the box in Orange County is on hot standby.

New services
When you buy a box that can do things, like traffic shaping and allocation, better and faster than you've been able to do them before, you obtain the ability to offer new services to your customers.

Color Broadband can now offer temporary bandwidth when a business needs it. For example, several customers are hotels that sometimes host trade shows and other events. "One week every other month, the hotel wants an 8 Mbps circuit for a week, and then at the end of the week we drop them back down to 2 Mbps," said LeMons.

Making the change is easy. It's just a drop down in the GUI (see image below).

The important point is not the specific service but the fact that changes that allow you to do things more efficiently may allow you to make more money by offering a new services (making money by offering new services has been a theme of ISP-Planet since it was founded in 1999).

In other cases, business have critical applications, such as CRM, that are hosted. Color Broadband can give those applications guaranteed bandwidth, which is critical, for example, for an accounting firm entering tax preparation season.

Color Broadband offers its own VoIP service, for which it can guarantee QoS, but LeMons says the company also works to ensure that third party VoIP providers such as Vonage achieve the quality they need.

Security
Allot likes to promote the fact that control of bandwidth also provides security for your customers. Asked about this, LeMons said that the company has several churches as customers, including the Church of Scientology. "Every once in a while, the network gets flooded by people going after Scientology. We can shut down the flood easily. We could do it on the backend but it's much nicer to go on the Allot box and shut it down instantaneously."

Conclusion
We explained at the start of the interview that every WISP likes to know what every other WISP is doing to solve the problems everyone faces. "I talk to a lot of WISPs," said LeMons. "Everybody's nosy, asking how other people do things. It's coopetition. I tell them I use Allot. We looked at Packeteer and others but I didn't like the way they handle packets. They were full duplex and the Allot 402 was half duplex, which is good for an ISP. Now I have the 1010, which is full duplex, and I'd like it to be half duplex, but that's the only complaint I have. I brag about the Allot box to a lot of people, and Allot will refer people to me."

— End