Infrastructure Woes
A new 2.4GHz dish on the SparkFun roofs adds a third connection to the internet.
Sorry for the long delay in homepage posts. We've been just slammed with projects, orders, fun stuff, award ceremonies, and some infrastructure issues.
Now don't get confused - the webpage you are currently looking at is
hosted on two boxes located somewhere in the world. We're not entirely
sure where. These colo'd servers have a giant pipe to the interweb, with
good airconditioning and big backup batteries for power. They should
never go down. The internet connection to the SparkFun office building
is a bit of a different story...
We out grew our 1.5Mbps synchronous T1 about 8 months ago (~$400 per month).
We added a DSL backup around January that got us around 5.5Mbps down (woot!) and 0.7Mbps up (ugh) for ~$125 (woot!). That lasted us another 5 months before things really started to bind up in May/June.
Over the past few weeks we broke the 60 employee mark! Yay! At the same time, our connection to the internet has suffered greatly. Lots of time outs. Lots of bribing the IT guys. Lots of stress. We've scrambled to upgrade our connection to 10Mbps synchronous (yea!) using Qwest metro optical ethernet (QMOE - ~$1500 a month, ugh), but ran into some major delays. We need a fix today, and Qwest told us 60-90 days! So while we are patiently waiting (and trying to sweet talk anyone we can at QWEST), we found yet another solution called SkyBeam. SkyBeam saved our ass. We called on Monday and I think they had a small rectangular box (it looks like a 2.4GHz WiFi dish) on the top of our building on Wednesday. On top of that, the little dish (pointed at the Colorado foothills) is 2Mpbs synchronous, which is faster than anything we currently have, and is only $195 per month!
It's amazing how much it hurts to have slow internet - possibly worse than no internet. Thank you SkyBeam and thank you SparkFun IT for getting us back our internet fix.
