So what can we do to decrease the likelihood of another outage such as that on Friday and minimize the impact on any outage that does happen?Long term, we know the answer. We need to increase our network density to the point where most of our members have at least two independent paths back to (ideally) different local head ends, (ideally) served by different upstream fiber providers. That's the only really robust solution I'm aware of and that is our plan for the long term.Today our pilot network has just one upstream vendor, Cogent, and just one head
I suppose it had to happen, our first major outage. Mostly I worry about wireless issues, but to the extent they cause problems at all, the problems tend to be local. What happened last night was caused by damage to one of the fibers in a Cogent cable between the basement and the 54th floor of the John Hancock Tower and the result was an outage affecting everyone on our Back Bay network. It started at 3:45pm on Friday and, with the help of a Cogent technician who was dispatched to the Hancock Tower, we were back up and running
netBlazr Co-founder and CEO Jim Hanley was interviewed in a segment that aired on Monday on the Boston Neighborhood News Network. Jim focused on the internet duopoly and how it impacts small and medium-sized businesses, while sharing our vision for a Boston internet cooperative.Check out the full interview online
netBlazr announced today that it has raised $275K and has another $50K committed to its efforts to expand its innovative free internet service to Boston businesses. With Carbonite (a netBlazr co-op member) Founder and CEO David Friend leading the round, netBlazr continues discussions with additional investors and angels interested in revolutionizing broadband in America.“After bootstrapping our business for the first year, we’re eager to accelerate our growth in the Boston market,” states Jim Hanley, Co-founder and CEO. “This capital will fund our expansion into 3 new areas of the city and provide the sales and marketing support to spread the
Ever have a million projects that need to be completed right now, but your internet seems to be taking minutes to load, even a single webpage?This is sadly way more common than it should be and is likely caused by one of the following:Insufficient Bandwidth: Happens when way too many people are trying to connect to the same network connection. Unless you pay a large amount of money to your internet service provider, you are not assured the amount of bandwidth you need to always have a fast internet connection.Multiple Toolbars and Tabs Open: This one goes
Last week we spent some time putting together the beginnings of an online ad campaign. It's a work in progress, but we're excited to see how it works for us. (Shout out if you have seen our ads!)As part of our strategy in crafting our ads, we decided to do some research on what large internet companies like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T stress in their online ads and website pitches. The buzz words could be summed up in three categories:The expected: phrases like "high speed," "secure," "24/7 support," and "business-class." Some even suggested "reliability," but it came up much less often
