On January 31th 2009 we completed two projects very critical to our business.
 
        August of 2007 after our last increase in bandwidth we started searching for our next
bandwidth upgrade. Because of our location bandwidth is very hard to come by if you want
anything greater than T1 or bonded T1 speeds and don't want to patch things together with
Duck Tape. We had out grown the good ol' T1 and the next logical step was DS3
services and/or Fiber optics. After many months of negotiations we were able to reach an
agreement with Global Crossing to provide us with DS3 services over fiber. On January
26th 2009, 24 pair fiber was run to our office and an OC3 was installed in our communications room. This fiber optic upgrade has
paved the way so future upgrades become less expensive and much faster to install.
        At present we are a multi-homed ISP with high capacity links to both Global Crossing and Cogent. In preparation to become
multi-homed we needed to give back our old AT&T addresses in favor of a direct allocation of our own IP addresses from ARIN.
This direct allocation of address space means we no longer depend on other service providers and we are considered to be an
autonomous system (AS) on the Internet. For our customers this means we have become a recognized entity on the Internet and our
IP address will never need to change because we have been given the sole right to this IP address space.
 
        One problem we had with upgrading to fiber was where to put it. We were out of wall and rack space in our little 10 X 10
room so we needed to do something. We found some nice and inexpensive equipment racks and a raised floor. Without changing
building structures we converted our office into a modern Information Center and completely replaced our backup power solution.
Now our 10 X 10 room is referred to as the communications room and the 20 X 15 room next to it is the server room that
houses all our routers, switches and servers. We installed a 10kVA backup battery that will run the Information Center for
about 4 hours and we have a 20kW generator on site. All of our equipment is connected to both battery power and direct
grid power either with dual power supplies or transfer switches. This means that a failure in either power source will not cause
system downtime.
 
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