Download the full Santa Barbara News Press article PDF here.

Article featured in Sunday edition of the Santa Barbara New-Press www.newspress.com and www.ampersandstudiossb.com

Come to our third annual office party on Thursday April 19th from 5pm to 8pm and help us celebrate the launch of our NextGen Broadband.  Enjoy great drinks, food and network with some of the leading executives and technology professionals in the area.  The party is at our great office located at 5383 Hollister Ave, suite 240 in Goleta.  The invitation is extended to all customers, partners, potential new customers, and friends.

Please RSVP to party@impulse.net with your name and any other guests that you wish to bring.

Article featured in Sunday edition of the Santa Barbara New-Press www.newspress.com and www.ampersandstudiossb.com

Impulse launches Next-Gen Broadband targeted at small businesses.

Impulse is excited to announce the second product based on our next-generation Santa Barbara network.  Impulse Next-Gen Broadband is designed from the ground up to provide reliability and quality for Santa Barbara’s small to mid-size businesses.  With a focus on redundancy and speed, Impulse Next-Gen broadband is delivered by two independent Internet connections working together.  Speeds up to 35Mbps x 3Mbps are available for qualifying businesses.

The technology is based on the newest version of the DSL specification which enables single Internet connections up to 25Mbps.  To ensure a rock solid Internet experience Impulse is bonding two of these connections to provide a faster, more reliable service.  Bonding allows us to provide up to 35Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

When Impulse set out to design this new service, we based it on the communication solutions previously reserved for larger businesses.  These features include redundancy with auto-failover and lower latency and jitter for VoIP, video chatting and remote desktop.  Rather than just focusing on speed we believe the quality and reliability of the Internet connection is just as important.

By bonding two Internet circuits we are able to provide faster speeds at further distances to customers.  If a circuit has any issues a customers Internet will seamlessly continue to function with no noticeable side effects besides a speed degradation.  All Next-Gen Internet circuits are proactively monitored so in the event of any circuit failure our local Santa Barbara team are alerted 24×7.

The following dedicated speeds are available for qualifying businesses between Carpinteria and Goleta:

- 5 Mbps x 2 Mbps – $110/month

- 10 Mbps x 3 Mbps – $140/month

- 15 Mbps x 3 Mbps – $230/month

- 20 Mbps x 3 Mbps – $300/month

- 35 Mbps x 3 Mbps – $400/month

To learn more contact Impulse at 805.456.5800 or email sales@impulse.net

]]> http://www.impulse.net/blog/2012/01/23/web-wars-impulse-brings-faster-broadband-to-santa-barbara/feed/ 0 http://www.impulse.net/blog/2012/01/12/broadband-ethernet-launch/ http://www.impulse.net/blog/2012/01/12/broadband-ethernet-launch/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:11:15 +0000 Chris Rose http://www.impulse.net/blog/?p=334

Impulse Broadband Ethernet Gives Businesses Quality, High-Speed Internet Access

At a time when businesses depend on Internet access more than ever, a Santa Barbara company is rolling out a next-generation network that will provide fast, high-quality bandwidth to the region.

Impulse Advanced Communications, a Santa Barbara-based provider of voice and data communications services, is deploying its Impulse Broadband Ethernet, the first viable alternative network of its kind designed to meet the demands for dedicated bandwidth and fast upload speeds of businesses from Goleta to Carpinteria.

Impulse married traditional technology – copper wires – with cutting-edge hardware to create the network. Based on technology known as Ethernet over Copper (EoC), Impulse Broadband Ethernet will provide symmetrical bandwidth speeds up to 40Mbps – fast enough to handle the upload speeds companies need as they move their business software to the cloud.

Impulse set in motion its next-generation network when it saw Internet options for businesses on the South Coast remaining narrow while demand for bandwidth was increasing. Business Internet access comes through three pipelines: coaxial cable, traditional copper wire and fiber optics. Cox Communications owns and controls the region’s coaxial cable lines and Verizon stopped upgrading its copper lines and has been focused on its wireless business and building a residential television network in large markets.

But Verizon’s traditional copper lines, which are linked to virtually every business and home in the region, are available to all telecommunications carriers with the proper license. So, 18 months ago, Impulse received its Competitive Local Exchange Carrier license (CLEC), which allows it to use all of Verizon’s copper wire between a customer’s building and Impulse’s equipment.

Thanks to big advances in technology, Impulse is able to deploy equipment that provides fast, high-quality Internet access using copper wires. All the copper wire between Ellwood and Carpinteria run to six Central Offices (C.O.), and Impulse has leased space in five of them. The wire is connected to Impulse’s next-generation hardware at the C.O. and ends at the customer’s site, where a device provides a standard Ethernet connection. Impulse will offer symmetrical bandwidth speeds of 5Mbps, 10Mbps, 20Mbps, 30Mbps or 40Mbps.

For more information on this game changing business connection click here or give Impulse a call at 805-456-5800.

Internet access is primarily delivered via three different types of transport: coaxial cable (“coax”), fiber, or traditional copper pairs of wire originally used for telephone service. Coax is owned in Santa Barbara by the local cable company, Cox. Cox is in charge of these lines and controls the equipment used to provide Internet over their facilities. Fiber is a great option for high speed bandwidth but the cost of trenching all the streets in Santa Barbara and laying fiber to each customer premises is prohibitive. That leaves good old fashioned copper wires. The copper is controlled by Verizon in the Santa Barbara area, but since it was originally deployed through a government-regulated monopoly, all phone companies with the proper license can use this shared copper infrastructure to provide communications services.

For the last few years Verizon has stopped improving Internet offerings using their traditional copper and focused instead on deploying fiber to the home (FiOS) in areas of new construction where they can create a new monopoly on that fiber. T-1s and DSL are the only options and DSL has been stuck at 7Mbps x 768Kbps. Impulse decided it was time to change this. Eighteen months ago we received our Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) license which allows us to use Verizon’s raw copper wire between the customer premises and our electronics. All the copper in the area runs back to a Central Office (C.O.). There are six C.O.s from Ellwood to Carpinteria, and Impulse has leased space in five of them: Ellwood, Goleta, Los Positas, Santa Barbara, and Carpinteria.

There have been big advances in the equipment available to provide faster, higher quality Internet access using standard copper wires. Impulse has spent the last year deploying this next generation infrastructure and is ready to announce our first of a few new products: Impulse Broadband Ethernet. Impulse Broadband Ethernet provides dedicated symmetrical speeds of up to 40Mbps x 40Mbps. The product is designed for businesses in the Goleta to Carpinteria area that require quality dedicated bandwidth with fast upload speeds to connect to the Internet or to their other offices. Many companies have also moved their business software to the cloud and need much faster upload speeds than cable, T-1 or DSL can offer. Until now the only option for these companies was to work with companies like us to trench the streets and install costly fiber lines. While this is a great solution for a company with the budget, there are many other businesses that would benefit from these speeds but have not been able to justify the expense.

Impulse Broadband Ethernet is based on a technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC) which involves bonding up to 8 standard copper pairs of wire (“loop”), and depending on the distance the copper wire travels from the C.O., can provide speeds up to 5.7Mbps per loop. This copper wire is connected to Impulse’s next-generation hardware at the Verizon C.O. and terminated at the customer premises via a managed device that provides a standard Ethernet connection to the customer. Impulse offers the following symmetrical bandwidth speeds of 5Mbps, 10Mbps, 20Mbps, 30Mbps, or 40Mbps.

For more information on this game changing business connection click here or give Impulse a call at 805-456-5800.  Also stay tuned for our next small business communications products coming soon…

The problem is that the Mozilla apps are dlopen’ing libcups, Apple Writerwhich then initializes the SSL library. They then dlclose libcups after the print dialog goes away which leaves the OpenSSL threading stuff pointing at functions that are no longer in the process address space.

One of two things needs to happen – Firefox/Thunderbird need to stop using dlopen/dlclose (or at least dlclose) for libcups, or OpenSSL and GNU TLS need to actually support threading out of the box and not depend on the application or library to provide threading support.

The nice guys at CUPS now leave us in the hands of third parties to fix the problem. Some solutions I’ve read say to downgrade CUPS to 1.4.3 which apparently doesn’t exhibit this bug, which isn’t CUPS’ introduction. I wasn’t exactly satisfied with this. If you read in to the wording you will realize that there are three solutions. I mean… dlopen() isn’t an SSL command and dlopen() doesn’t provide dependency support. Then who is loading libSSL? CUPS… So if the problem isn’t CUPS, then compiling CUPS without SSL support shouldn’t fix the problem. For you binary guys, have fun… For you non binary guys keep reading…

The configure script for CUPS allows for the use of –disable-ssl. Setting this will fix your problem. Compile then like normal. Keep in mind that this will disable SSL for the CUPS daemon. You wouldn’t be able to do secure printing over the network or provide an encrypted web front end. For most users we use CUPS to just print and by default it isn’t listening on public interfaces.

If you’re using Gentoo then the following should work fine for you…

echo “net-print/cups -ssl” >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -av cups

Before I start any flame wars, I am not saying that Mozilla is correct. I’m especially not saying this because I haven’t run in to any other applications with this problem. I am saying that the CUPS developers are diluting the truth about the problem and not exposing a possible solution for people having difficulties. If 1.4.4 has bug fixes, features or hardware support that is required then the user may not be able to downgrade or wait for a third party solution. Compromises are occasionally necessary and CUPS shouldn’t be run in the same manner that Apple is.

Dave Clark has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Coastal Housing Coalition, board president Jim Youngson announced Tuesday.

Clark is president of Impulse Advanced Communications, a Goleta-based communications services provider that designs, implements and manages voice and data networks to prepare businesses for growth.  Read more…