I spent some time today working on an equipment order and decided to run a report to see what upgrades we had left to do at any of our smaller tower sites to go along with the projects on our work schedule. What I found was that I am about $17,000 and three months of work from the finish line, and I thought that was something worth celebrating.
Let me explain…
I look at network upgrades kind of like I look at my email inbox. More stuff is always going to show up and have to be dealt with, but two or three times a year I get to the end of my inbox and there is no email there that requires my attention. The next day, the inbox starts to fill up again, but I always take a little bit of time to feel like I got caught up.
Vistabeam is coming up on our tenth year in business, and it seems like it has been a life of constant upgrades and expansion. We started out with three towers fed by T1 lines and are now at 114 different AP or BH locations with 2500+ miles of microwave backhaul. To say that the expansion was uneven and not always well planned would be an accurate. There was a lot of learning and experimenting that went on throughout that time, and the messes did not always get cleaned up right away. Throughout that time, the business evolved and one of the important steps in that evolution was to clean up all of the messes right down to the last lonely repeater.
I am really proud of the progress that we have made over the last year. We made a concerted effort to put adequate, monitored battery backups and power controllers at all of our sites, documented the network with a very detailed database, replaced old StarOS backhauls with Mikrotiks and overloaded Mikrotiks with licensed links, added AP capacity where it was needed, setup our NOC with a backup generator, moved the majority of our servers to a pair of XEN servers with a NAS and revised our customer plans to eliminate all sub-1meg speed packages. Doesn’t sound like that much, but when you are dealing with 2500+ customers spread out across three states and ten years of accumulated errors and omissions – it is a pretty sizeable challenge.
Anyway, it feels good to finally be at the point where it looks like there will be a day, sometime before the end of the year, when I will be able to look at the to-do list and see that there isn’t anything on it.
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