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Download the full Pacific Coast Business Times Web Wars article PDF here.

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.

As the business world continues to become more reliant on Internet access to do business, with more and more of what we do every day in business  sits in “the cloud” it is becoming critical for even small businesses to have highly redundant Internet access.  Most network providers and large businesses maintain large connections to different Internet backbones and use complex technologies to make the network operate through a failure of one of those paths.  Small to mid-size businesses are generally reliant on a single connection or a single and a back-up without any automated failover.  In the server world of small business redundancy in server hardware is common, and High Availability clusters are becoming more common, where redundant systems communicate with each other and automatically fail over when the other one fails.   We are in the business of bringing the high availability (or “HA”) concept to network connectivity and are introducing our HA Internet Access product for small business that bring the small business high availability over inexpensive circuits, and we handle the complex technology to make it fail over.

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