(Continued from Part 1…)

Fast-forward a few weeks to today… we are still on non-line-of-sight WiFi access, and it’s still OK. However, we’re also finally getting snow in Ohio, and when the snow comes down we notice a pretty good drop in our bandwidth. This makes things pretty tough on our staff. Again, we’re F-1 customers, so almost everything we do relies on that internet connection.

I was at lunch and I got a phone call from a rep at Time-Warner. I was very curious to know what this was about. He was calling to ask about our cancellation at our old building (apparently it hadn’t been processed). He asked about our moving, where we we going, and…”so what are you guys doing for internet access?”

I proceeded to tell him the story about how we had gotten a bodacious price tag from them to activate the cable that was already installed. He said “That sounds really high. Let me look up your location and run the numbers again.”

The rep sent me an email with the numbers that he ran. I about fell out of my chair.

• The installation fee for the cable would be WAIVED if we signed a 3-year commitment.
• The monthly cost would be $140 with a $300 one-time setup fee.
• The $140/month price tag would net us a 6Mb x 512k connection with a static IP. (I would order more, for sure.)

What happened to that $4000 installation fee? The 5-year commitment? The $500/month cost? Apparently it was a miscalculation!

Needless to say, the prospect of having another internet connection in the building REALLY has me stoked. Not to mention, the price is well within our reach. I ran the numbers down to Todd and Mike, and they were equally impressed. We’ll definitely talk about it more, but things are certainly looking up right now.

More on this as it progresses…

I’m going to backtrack here a little bit and share a story that I should have been blogging about months ago.

In May 2006 we placed a call to Adelphia (our local cable company back then) and asked how much it would cost us to have a cable trenched to our new building. The response from the local office was “if you provide the trench for us, we’ll install the cable for free.” Fantastic, right? I figured we would have no problem at all getting wired for internet access, and from what Todd and I can tell, the bill isn’t going to go up unless we put some more static IPs on the account.

Fast-forward to October. I’m back from the first Church IT Roundtable at GCC, and I’m PUMPED. Things are really coming together with the new network. The cable from Adelphia is physically in the building, actually in the room adjacent to the server room. However, Time-Warner has since taken over the area, so we’re now dealing with a whole different group of people (you can’t deal with just the local office for business-class internet access, apparently). We’ve got a couple calls into their Columbus office, and boy were we in for a shock.

It turns out that TWC calculated that we would have to help cover the construction cost for the cable install. WHAT?! Didn’t Adelphia say that all we had to do was “provide the trench?” Apparently Adelphia’s word didn’t stick during the turnover process, because these guys are asking for money, about $4000 (!!!) just to pay for the cable install. On TOP of that, our monthly bill would be over $500/month, and we would have to sign a 5-year commitment! YUCK!!

I was sick…like the STRESSED sick that you have when you smell that burnt electronic smell coming from the server room. What are we going to do? DSL isn’t available at the building, and a T1 is just as expensive. Can we do WiFi only? I had planned on using it as a backup…but for a primary (and sole) internet connection that is mission-critical?

Todd and I spent a lot of time talking about this, and we ultimately decided that we should just wait it out a little bit and see what our options are. To get us by, we hooked up with Lightspeed Wireless and installed a non-line-of-sight antenna on the building. The install happened 2 days before our staff took occupancy of the new office.

The WiFi service has proved to be pretty solid. Yeah, there’s some latency, but over all things have gone better than I expected. We’ve had a couple outages, but we’ve been blessed to not have an outage during a Sunday morning. (We are Fellowship One users — enough said.) I still get pretty nervous from time to time though. Fortunately, Kyle (Lightspeed’s CTO, and also an attender at NewPointe) constantly monitors our IP address. Kyle has already called my cell phone 2 minutes after I rebooted our firewall just to make sure that things were ok with our connection. Talk about going the extra mile!