Postings from Dane Jasper
Honey flows from the centrifugal extractor
It’s great to see (and eat!) the beautiful local product that these hard working and useful insects do.
I’ve added two swarms to my apiary this season. With the two (out of three) hives which survived the winter, I’ve got a total of four hives up and running now. They are doing well in West Sonoma County. The most recent swarm was at an apartment complex in Santa Rosa, about fifteen feet high on branch. Sonic.net’s bucket truck made it a quick and easy job to put them in a swarm box for transport.
On our new FlexLink & Fusion product platform, we have completed build out of 19 COs in this LATA, and number twenty, Sacramento, is still pending some backhaul to this LATA.
Sales are going well, both in enterprise and residential. This is particularly interesting considering that a key product for both is voice. We are unable to make quite a number of business sales because they want an integrated voice and data product, and we are unable to make a lot of residential sales because they want POTS voice.
Notable also is that batch hot cut (where the existing AT&T voice pair is moved from them to us, meaning the household/office wiring doesn’t have to be re-done) and LNP (local number port) have the potential to really ease installation of residential products, bringing us true self-install for residential. We’re doing our first attempt at BHC now for a customer in Berkeley.
In total, we are serving over 200 total accounts on the platform today, and that’s growing quickly, even absent significant promotion for residential (which we can really get into once we have BHC/LNP as noted above.)
We’ve been paused on building new COs for a couple months now, and it’s time to get that pipeline moving again. Because it takes in total almost six months from order to turn-up, making those decisions now is key.
In the ideal, if we can continue to prove the business model, I’d like to see us turning up an average of two new COs per month.
So based upon this goal, we have been studying next CO opportunities. The decisions are based upon a number of data points. These include current coverage (filling in holes and creating continuous overlays), brand awareness, existing current DSL user counts, density and distances, RT vs. CO served footprint, estimation of the size of the symmetric & voice business market, drive time for installation, and plain guesswork.
This list of six CO choices allows us to get the ball rolling, and with the one per two week goal, it buys us three months before we must decide on what’s next after these.
So, first up:
Cotati, which has long loops and not a ton of residential opportunity, but it completes our Sonoma County 101 corridor coverage, and provides some great opportunity for T1 and other long reach products in the Northern business parks of Petaluma.
Sonoma and Napa. Both have reasonable residential loop lengths, are close to home, and we have decent brand recognition (in Sonoma at least.) Both have some great opportunities for T1 and voice for wineries, and I believe that this along with the residential opportunity will make them cash flow.
These three will be built first, and there is some synergy with the driving for build-out and for installations. Stop at Sonoma on the way to Napa, etc.
Next up are San Rafael and Oakland. San Rafael has two COs, but the main downtown one is the one we can more clearly justify build-out in. It’s got good residential and business penetration, and it’s on the 101, so there’s some benefits for installers and build-out.
Oakland has four COs, but we’ll be building the Northern two of them. These serve far more existing residential users, and the downtown business district. These two also directly connect to Berkeley and that to Albany, so it creates a large single coverage block for us. That’s
good for installations and sales, keeping drive time down.
These six COs will be kicked off this week, and we will begin planning for the hardware and build-out.
After these, the choices become a bit more difficult. For example, Mountain View is the next logical one based upon our current DSL users, but it’s a long drive and we don’t have a lot of brand awareness. San Jose is a good business customer opportunity, but there are four COs
meaning high build-out costs, and it’s got a lot of competitive options we’d have to face. We’ll cross these bridges when we come to them, in a couple months, with more information about the profitability of our current COs to inform us.
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We’ve recently gotten into the television business. It’s something we’ve done rather quietly so far, as we can really only install a certain amount with our current staff.
Television is something that I see as a natural synergy with broadband access, and it’s a bundling opportunity for customers who want to save a bit of money. This evolution is part of the “Fusion” philosophy; a goal of delivering broadband, landline voice, mobile voice and television, either together or a la carte.
Sonic.net DirecTV allows customers to bundle with their Internet access for a discount, plus manage customer service, installation and repair all through Sonic.net’s great local staff.
The other good news though is High Def. Through our partnership with DirecTV, we’ve got the largest number of HD channels available, currently at 104. A recent Pike & Fischer report compares DirecTV and Verizon FIOS (103 HD channels) to cable and concludes:
Quote: “Comcast, the largest cable operator in the United States, has one of the smallest selections of HD channels, according to the study. Comcast in some markets is offering less than 40 HD channels, although the company’s marketing focuses on its large selection of HD movies, TV shows and other content available on demand.
Cable networks do not have the same capacity as Verizon’s all-fiber infrastructure and DirecTV’s satellite coverage, and thus face more constraints on bandwidth for HD channels.”
So, nice news about HD and Sonic.net DirecTV. We’ve got lots of great HD options!
The City of Santa Rosa IT team and Sonic.net were a big part of the first stage of the Amgen Tour of California event. Sonic.net provided key infrastructure for the Amgen Tour television production and for the local events in Railroad Square.
Feeding the television production’s main Sat-Link truck, Sonic.net provided a 10Mbps/10Mbps FlexLink Ethernet connection. This circuit was delivered with just two weeks notice. (The typical turnaround for these type of products is 30 days.) The fast Ethernet symmetric connection was used to deliver a LAN for a day throughout the High-Def TV production area, serving various production trailers.
In Railroad Square, Sonic.net provided a fast DSL connection to deliver video to the “Jumbotron”, keeping race fans updated with news on the race.
We are very excited about our new FlexLink Ethernet and Fusion ADSL products, which are available for both business and residential users. Sunday’s event was a great chance to show off the capabilities of these fast products.
FlexLink offers 1.5Mbps (T1) up to 30Mbps Ethernet connections for business users. FlexLink includes strong service level agreements with a four hour repair response which is essential for business. FlexLink Ethernet has widespread availability, going beyond the length restrictions of consumer DSL connections.
Fusion Broadband DSL provides asymmetric broadband service using a dedicated line, with optional conventional line shared voice telephone service coming soon. Speeds offered range from up to 6Mbps/1Mbps to 18Mbps/1Mbps. In the future, Fusion Broadband will offer pair bonding for faster speeds at all distances, and faster upstream speed options are also in the works.
We have been working on a large upgrade to our power capacity in our datacenter. The work today was a key step in bringing online our new Mitsubishi 500KVA backup power system. This massive unit is our third UPS, the others are a Leibert 130KVA unit and a Powerware 160KVA.
The system design and the work today was supervised by Russ Irving, our staff power system expert. The work was accomplished without any interruption in service to our datacenter. During the transition, we had a second standby generator and transfer switch wired in to the power and cooling systems via a carefully orchestrated process.
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It’s cool and wet tonight, the perfect conditions for the creation of steam in our cooling plant. Below are a photos of the two cooling towers putting out steam and mist.
This equipment uses outside air to cool and compress freon, which is then piped inside to large air handlers in the data center. See our cooling system video for an overview.
Each of the cooling towers has 200 tons of cooling capacity, for a total of 400 RT (refrigeration tons) in the system. Either of the two towers can accommodate our current data center cooling requirement, so we have redundant capacity, allowing for failure or maintenance.
What’s 200 tons of cooling capacity mean? From Wikipedia:
The unit ton is used in refrigeration and air conditioning to measure heat absorption. Prior to the introduction of mechanical refrigeration, cooling was accomplished by delivering ice. Installing one ton of refrigeration replaced the daily delivery of one ton of ice.
In North America, a standard ton of refrigeration is 12,000 BTU/h = 200 BTU/min ≈ 3,517 W. This is approximately the power required to melt one short ton (2,000 lb) of ice at 0 °C in 24 hours, thus representing the delivery of 1 ton of ice per day.
So, if I’m doing my math right, with both towers at full capacity we could chill the equivalent of about one point four million watts. That would be an awful lot of trucks full of ice!
We have been getting push-back from customers on the policy that Fusion is only available with a single static IP. While we’d hoped that NAT & PAT would allow for whatever capabilities people need, the bottom line is that customers want more than one static IPs.
So, in the near future we’ll begin offering four and eight IP blocks with Fusion. We cannot do this immediately because we simply don’t have enough IP address space; it eats up a lot because we must allocate at least a full /24 to every single CO, which we haven’t done at this point, and we simply don’t have enough address space.
(Sidebar: Today we route each CO a /25 (half a class C) for statics, and had planned to accommodate 125 static IP broadband users in that block. With eight IP blocks, we can only fit 14 customers in a /25. Because of this, we have to get bigger blocks to each CO before we can begin these larger allocations.)
Pricing is to be determined – it is likely to be a slightly different price point for each level of IPs.
If you want more than one static IP address, I encourage you to wait to order Fusion until the product is defined, priced, and integrated into the ordering tools.
Thanks everyone for the feedback!
-Dane
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One of the arcane arts of telco is cable lacing with wax string. I’ve been given a crash course by Juston, and I managed to demonstrate on some test cables and ties that the CEO hasn’t lost his knack.
Here are a couple examples of some simple cable lacing used to manage a set of large cables. Yup, I tied these myself. The third image is a cable end itself, with an AMP Champ tool and the connector just after termination.
Check out Wikipedia’s cable lacing article out for more infomation. For additional info, tools and supplies (you can do this at home!), see Tecra Tools.
New vehicle livery, at Forestville CO
Forestville was last on the list, as it’s the smallest town we will be initially serving on the new network. Despite it’s small size, Sonic.net today serves a surprising amount of DSL there, and I’m personally hopeful that it does well. As it’s my home town, I’ve got a best of a vested interest. (No, to answer the obvious question, we didn’t build out an entire CO because the CEO lives nearby. I’m well served today with very fast wireless access.)
Here’s a photo taken late today as the light faded, the central office in the background. What do you think of our new livery?