Small Business Networking and Equipment Questions - Wired Internet Alternatives

[CholoLord]

Question for all of the network installers and managers.  I am in an interesting predicament when it comes to internet at my company.  Let me set the stage for you a minute so you understand how we got to this point so you can share my frustration.  First of all, I started a landscape company in high school about 7 years ago and now we have about 85 employees and are growing faster than ever. We are based in Fort Collins, Colorado and we have 6 office staff who require internet. I purchased a 56 acre nursery off of a major highway in our area.  The nursery had relocated and I had actually worked here for 3 years before I started the company.  The land was actually an old farm with a house that is 102 years old with a large trailer attached which served as the retail storefront which we just use as a breakroom now.  Shortly after my departure from the nursery they were bought out by a national landscape supply company called Site One.  Since it turned corporate, they completely wired the ancient farmhouse with over 100 CAT6 POE ports. They installed a Cisco Meraki system with 2 AP's.  One outside and one in the conference room. When we were buying the place I was shocked when I walked in the basement and saw a full rack of switches, battery backups, backup cellular internet with an antenna installed on the roof.  I asked my friend and he said for our application it would be absolutely acceptable which was fine with me.  I didn't want to deal with an insanely difficult to manage system, considering I am a landscaper, not a network manager remember .  Before we purchased the property, the nursery had moved up the road to an insanely large piece of land and the property sat empty for 2 years.  During those 2 years, the City of Fort Collins passed legislation to install a city managed fiber network, which is amazing!  I have it at my house which is 2 minutes up the road, barely outside of the map I attached later.  The problem is, when they passed that legislation, they highly highly regulated the ISP's from installing new equipment and signing new customers.  To the point where I have heard they are outright banned from signing new customers now.  I do not know if that is entirely true.  When we moved into the property, I remember us always having Century link when I was working there and I confirmed with the previous owners.  I was expecting to just call, get the fastest plan available, and start everything up.  Boy, was I wrong.  After hours and hours of pleading with customer service people, I was told over and over again they cannot provide internet to our location anymore. Even though, the gas station literally touching our property is currently using Century Link.  I called every other ISP in the area and got the same response.  I called Fort Collins Connexion, the city fiber company and they told me that they were not planning on installing fiber out to our location. I reached out to our county and they said well, you are basically in a no-mans land when it comes to utilities.  I did, in fact buy this land partially due to how it was zoned.  We are a landscape company and we have equipment, large trucks, trailers of rock, trailers of mowers, etc.  Our yard is not going to be the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. I did not want to adhere to any of the city codes when it came to how I ran my facility and since I was not in the town limits of any of them, conveniently by chance. Attached is a map to help visualize.  I did do my part and plant trees completely around it so it will block it in the future and also made the farmhouse look awesome.  With all of this said, no matter who I was talking to I was getting nowhere.    So, with all of this bad luck, I had just bought a new location for my business and I cannot get internet.  I decided to cut my losses and look for other options.  Luckily, my uncle is a higher up at Cradlepoint who manufactures cellular routers to mainly service company's and government agency's.   He sent me over one of their best cellular routers for free.  On our property, not 100 yards from our office is an AT&T tower.  It is actually on our land and they pay us monthly to have it there, well, some other subcontractor pays us for AT&T. We did a speed test comparing all of the service providers and AT&T was the fastest.  I got the sim card, connected it to the rack and we were all set. The AT&T cell servers are in Dallas, and that is where our internet is connecting through which does not help latency.  Unless I use a VPN there is no way around this.  Google always thinks we are looking for things in Texas which can get annoying.  It has now worked pretty darn well for about a year and a half.  More recently, I have started getting more and more frustrated with our internet.  It randomly drops off, certain web pages refuse to load. Our phone system which is VOIP from Ooma has no problems and never cuts out and it has over 8 phones connected receiving many calls throughout the day.     It is just not reliable and the best speed I am getting wired is about 22-28 Mbps.  For a normal email and spreadsheets employee, that is adequate. For me, however.  This is not okay.   Everyone in our company has an iPhone, iPad and a Mac.  I chose mac because of the friends and familly I started it with.  My main workstation is a Asus ROG Zephyrus and I use my mac for communication on a seperate set of monitors.   I had used Mac on a daily basis my whole life until I got into PC gaming and then I was using both daily.  The Apple ecosystem is just so easy for a business setting.  Having all of the messages, airdrop, airprint, apple tv's, screen mirroring, etc.  It just makes it easy.  Before I start a war here, let me get to my questions.

 

1. What other alternatives for internet should I seek out?  I was thinking Starlink, but I have to put a deposit and wait a year. 

2. Is the Meraki system the best use case for my company?

3. Would installing a network wide VPN and connecting to the Denver servers be beneficial?

4. Is SimpleMDM a good product?  I keep seeing it sponsored on LTT videos and want to try it. 

 

I would appreciate any feedback or ideas you have!

Joe

[mariushm]

One idea would be to  to rent a house or something across the i-25 highway in Timnath or maybe across that pond/lake/whatever water is to the left of your property, or somewhere with direct line of sight with your property  and use point to point wireless to get internet onto your property.

From there, you could use fiber to your office or cat6 if it's less than 100 metes / 300-ish ft.

On your property you could raise a high pole or mount the receiving antenna on top of a thick tall tree, if you have one, and you could then reduce interference, get better signal.

 

I can't tell the elevation from the picture, if you can get line-of-sight with Timnath or other places.

There's also other solutions like radio modems, but those - and to a lesser degree wireless - will have degraded performance when it rains or snows.

 

Yeah... found your place on google maps ... looks like the picture is misleading, seems like on the right it's just a costco and parking lot not the actual town. Bottom left corner is more promising, across Strauss Cabin Rd, lots of houses there, maybe you could rent one either as a private person or as office for your company and hopefully that place can get fiber or some solid connection. Then you could just beam internet across the water to your place.

 

I don't have time to get into details about network equipment and don't have much experience with Meraki, so others can fill in there.

 

 

[CholoLord]

On 9/29/2022 at 1:13 AM, mariushm said:

One idea would be to  to rent a house or something across the i-25 highway in Timnath or maybe across that pond/lake/whatever water is to the left of your property, or somewhere with direct line of sight with your property  and use point to point wireless to get internet onto your property.

From there, you could use fiber to your office or cat6 if it's less than 100 metes / 300-ish ft.

On your property you could raise a high pole or mount the receiving antenna on top of a thick tall tree, if you have one, and you could then reduce interference, get better signal.

 

I can't tell the elevation from the picture, if you can get line-of-sight with Timnath or other places.

There's also other solutions like radio modems, but those - and to a lesser degree wireless - will have degraded performance when it rains or snows.

 

Yeah... found your place on google maps ... looks like the picture is misleading, seems like on the right it's just a costco and parking lot not the actual town. Bottom left corner is more promising, across Strauss Cabin Rd, lots of houses there, maybe you could rent one either as a private person or as office for your company and hopefully that place can get fiber or some solid connection. Then you could just beam internet across the water to your place.

 

I don't have time to get into details about network equipment and don't have much experience with Meraki, so others can fill in there.

 

 

I really appreciate your help here!  I feel like this is absolutely doable.  I definitely saw a video on LTT about that.  Ill need to watch again and see where I can snag a signal from.  we are kind of in a valley so we can get creative!