Max: 00:07 Hi. I’m Max Clark. This is 20 minutes max and we need to talk about how do you get network? How do you get fiber to your business? And so this could be Internet access or or private networks.
Max: 00:17 Before IT broker, I’ve been I’ve been actually doing this for about 25 years now. So lots of lots of lessons, lots of pain, lots of, successes along the way. I’m gonna give you a little some tips and tricks here. There’s only 5 ways to do this so don’t stress about it. You can purchase from the telco.
Max: 00:35 Great thing about tech is just like the military, there’s bajillion acronyms to all mean the same thing. So telcos, also known as the ILEC, the incumbent local exchange carrier, also known as the ARBOC, the regional Bell Operating Company. So you’re gonna hear those three terms interchangeably. So the telco is, who’s your telco? Your telco’s AT and T, your telco’s Verizon, it’s Frontier.
Max: 00:54 It’s, it’s Lumen in some markets. You know, obviously, that was all very US specific, but let’s just stick stick with the US. Right? So the telco is the phone company in your location. You have the cable company.
Max: 01:08 You also hear these things called MSOs and you get really nerdy. So big cable companies. Right? Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Cox, RCN, you know, these sorts of entities. These are the cable providers.
Max: 01:22 We’ve got CLEX, competitive local exchange carriers. CLEX are companies like Zayo, Lumen. I know I mentioned Lumen earlier when we’re talking about telcos, but, phone companies can be, ILEX. They can also be CLEX in different markets. But so, you know, CLEC is a company that’s come in and has registered with the state and they have the ability to pull their own cable and do things with it.
Max: 01:45 They’re not the phone company. No. They’re not the incumbent local exchange carrier. They’re an alternate. And the important thing also know with CLEX is you want to be really clear and make sure that they’re actually using their own facilities, their own stuff, and not the telco stuff or the cable company stuff.
Max: 01:58 Okay. Next on the list, we have power companies. Power companies sell fiber. Bet you didn’t know that. If you did, kudos to you pat yourself on the back.
Max: 02:04 Some power companies are excellent at selling fiber and some power companies are absolutely terrible at selling fiber. Some power companies will make it very easy for you to connect between different power, you know, different different facilities. Some some will make you happy HQ’d within their territory. Some want you to turn off power to the building before they’ll actually bring fiber into it. I mean, there’s lots of little things with this one power company.
Max: 02:27 Fiber is usually not an Internet access play. It’s gonna be more of a, a point to point or point to multipoint, you know, service kind of play. Last one’s wireless. So wireless, initial connotation would be like cell phone wireless. I’m not saying cell phone wireless here.
Max: 02:41 I’m actually talking about fixed wireless or point to point wireless. So these are, you know, dishes on the rooftop or instead of space, you know, pointing at space. This isn’t I’m not I’m not talking about Starlink, although Starlink fits here. I’m talking about you see these, you know, dishes pointing at each other building at each building and providing network across across those links. Now fun little trivia thing about wireless.
Max: 03:01 People don’t actually understand here a lot of the times is, you know, like everything, you can do it really cheaply and you can get the ghetto wireless. Don’t do that. When you get into licensed frequency fixed wireless circuits, they are extremely stable when you use a proper installer and and link loss planning. They’re extremely resilient to weather and atmospheric interference because they’re actually sized appropriately based on the actual power output, right, for your rain fade. And, they’re faster.
Max: 03:29 Wireless is faster than fiber. Now this was discovered if you’re in any sort of financial or commodities trading, stock or commodities trading, you know, this was discovered a few years ago and now rooftop in some markets like Chicago and New York has gotten really expensive because the value of wireless links is so high. There’s dedicated networks running from Chicago to New York for trading. There’s dedicated networks in London to Germany for trading. Same thing.
Max: 03:54 So you can have fixed wireless in your market. Also, nice thing about fixed wireless is all you have to do is has to have line of sight. So if you’re from your rooftop, they can see a tower that has their dishes on it. It’s a very fast install. It’s not very complicated.
Max: 04:05 So we do like wireless. Telco cable, sealac power company. Cable company sealac are gonna come into the building’s info, the minimum point of entry. This is usually on the ground floor of the basement of the building. There is some room that is the info.
Max: 04:17 It’s got plywood up on the walls. It’s got a conduit usually, that runs out to the street, and those three services are gonna come into that info. Now if you’re in a a freestanding building, it’s ground floor. There’s no basement. You could have an aerial run.
Max: 04:30 So an aerial run would be just a cable running from the telephone pole, from the wire, through the air into what’s called a weather head, which is the the way that actually comes into your building. So aerial’s also a good a really good option if you don’t wanna trench and put conduit in. If you can do an aerial run, ask them. Power company’s gonna come in through the power vault of the building. Wireless comes to the rooftop, and then comes down the risers from the roof.
Max: 04:50 Redundancy and common mistakes. Okay. Again, there’s only a few ways of doing this so don’t stress out. It’s really it’s really it’s really straightforward. The thing that you want when you’re actually talking about redundancy, the easiest way to do this is just to mix the access path and this is what I was saying earlier, buying service from a telco plus a cable company.
Max: 05:10 You’ve now mixed the access path into the building. Telcos and cable companies use different infrastructure. They connect to your building differently. They come in through different ways. You have generated a huge amount of redundancy just by using the Telco cable company.
Max: 05:22 Another way of using it is to use some sort of, you know, use some sort of wired and wireless. So if you go telco plus fixed wireless or cable plus fixed wireless, that’s generated a huge amount of redundancy because, you know, now you’re talking about there’s no wires coming to the building. So you don’t have to deal with, like, you know, cars hitting telephone poles for instance and taking out service because you have a wireless backup. Wireless is a phenomenal backup. You can do this by doing, circuit type.
Max: 05:47 So it’d be another common example of this. So dedicated fiber versus broadband. So surprisingly, if you have a if your only option practically is the cable company, you could get fiber from the cable company and you could also get a cable modem broadband from the cable company. And doing those two things could actually get you a lot of redundancy. It’s a little intuitive, but those networks run separately for a a good portion of that last mile to your building.
Max: 06:10 Those networks are not running the same infrastructure. Now there is a point where they converge, and that convergence point, becomes a critical point for you. But, you know, looking at how a cable modem comes into your building, you know, maybe that’s an area on the on the north side, and you’ve got fiber coming in from the south side. You can end up with a lot of redundancy, by the way, using the cable company with fiber and broadband. Not the same case with telcos if you’re talking about, you know, doing a a a dedicated fiber versus of a fiber to the premise type of solution.
Max: 06:38 If you went back to a copper based solution, maybe, but it’s really situationally dependent. Okay. Next thing is diverse routing. Every single one of these companies has an option if you ask for it to give you a diverse route into the building. It’s gonna increase the cost because you’re asking them to do more work.
Max: 06:54 Right? So it’s gonna increase the time to do the project, to get you pricing, to get you quotes, to get the installation, etcetera. But if you if you think about your location as a let me see how to do this here. If you think about your location as a point right here and you’ve got a network, a wire that runs on telephone pole that goes this way. Well, by default, maybe it’s coming from this route.
Max: 07:12 It’s coming from, you know, west to you and then coming into your building. Well, the cable company and the telco can run a second circuit that goes along this path. Right? So you got one that goes this way, and you got one that goes this way. So diverse routing is a phenomenal single vendor solution for redundancy.
Max: 07:26 It just you just have to be able to deal with the cost of the time. Now when you do diversity with a carrier don’t forget to have diverse entrances and diverse equipment in your building you have to specify this if you I’m gonna like stress this again you have to specify that you want a diverse network path you want diverse entrances and you want diverse equipment if you don’t specify those up front, you’ll end up with diverse paths, but not diverse entrances and not diverse equipment. So if the equipment fails, you go down. Or if the entrance facility fails, you go down, and the whole diversity is is all for naught. Going back to this earlier thing here, Come back here.
Max: 08:01 Right? Telco, Cableco, CLEX. Now CLEX and also resellers or aggregators will sell you diversity and I this this is something that, I’m gonna I’m gonna point out here because I’ve seen this happen so many times and so many people get burned thinking they did a good job for their their business and buying redundancy and not having any redundancy for their business. And why is that? Well, it’s because the carrier is gonna default to the easiest thing possible.
Max: 08:24 So if you go to let’s just say that you’ve got AT and T and you went to TPx and you, you you bought a redundant circuit from TPx. By default, TPx is going to sell you a network connection that’s gonna ride on top of AT and T’s fiber using that network path, the entrance, and the facility, the equipment that’s in the building. So gonna end up in a situation where your AT and T fiber runs off of a box, probably a Ciena box from AT and T, and then TPx buys a second port on that same Ciena gear that plugs into it. Now you still have some redundancy. You have network redundancy in the sense of, like, Internet, you know, pathway redundancy once you get to the, you know, TPx pop, but you don’t actually have diversity for the rest of the stuff that you maybe cared about.
Max: 09:01 And this is not exclusive to telcos. This happens the same thing with with cable companies. And you can go you can go to a CLEC, you know, that makes installs their own fiber. You can go to Zayo. You can go to Lumen, these kind of companies, and find out after the fact that they use spectrum or Comcast to deliver service to you.
Max: 09:16 So make sure you understand what you’re buying and how they’re gonna deliver service to you. It’s very important to get this stuff upfront. Make sure it’s specified on the paperwork you are or you’re signing if it’s not in the paperwork you’re signing you’re not getting it and you have no expectation or right or ability to fix it after the fact because they’re gonna deliver it to you you’re gonna say hey this isn’t redundant I ordered redundancy they’re gonna say no you ordered you know GigE circuit from us we delivered a GigE circuit to you this is what you get. Oh, you want something else? That’s gonna be a whole thing.
Max: 09:43 So check it before you sign. Check before you sign. Check before you sign. Now I’m gonna give you a tale of 2 buildings. Now this is one of those things.
Max: 09:50 Also check before you sign, is before you sign a lease at a building and sometimes you know the people that manage facilities and IT find out about leases signed after the fact there’s nothing we can do about it try to make friends with the people signing leases in your building and stress this to them to leave you into the loop that you are a trusted partner for them, that you’re gonna make their life easier, that you’re gonna get them the building turned up faster as a result of it. You’re gonna also save a big mistake. So here’s a tale of 2 buildings. I I used 2 addresses on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. I didn’t use the actual I’m gonna the the the source of the story.
Max: 10:23 I’m gonna leave them nameless and, but I’m gonna show you 2 buildings. So here’s 8604 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. And and if you notice here, you know, in our tool, we’re showing, you know, what telco, we’re showing what cable companies. This one’s AT and T and Spectrum. We’re building a list of fixed wireless operators that we know operate in these areas, fiber route and, you know, other buildings we’re aware of and and fiber access.
Max: 10:47 Right? So this one, very typical for this area. What do we see here? We see AT and T and Spectrum, and they’re both there. Right?
Max: 10:52 So if you’d sign a lease in this building and you said, hey, Max. You know, we’re moving to this building. We need service. What are we gonna do? And the answer is really simple.
Max: 10:59 Hey. You know, great. AT and T and Spectrum, your your ILEC and your cable company are both already there ready to go. You know? This is a very simple decision for you to make.
Max: 11:08 You know? Priceless supply, promo supply, move in special supply. We can talk about fixed wireless as if it’s in your redundancy requirements has alternatives but, away we go. Now if you look across the street this is 8539. Right?
Max: 11:24 There’s actually all we know that’s there is that it’s AT and T territory. They’re not on net. There’s no fiber in this building. There’s no cable currently in this building, fixed wireless, you know, depending on how this building actually is if it’s too short and the building next to it’s too tall maybe fixed wireless is or is not an option I’m using these buildings as intersection here at La Ciena again sunset for a very important point and I had a client many many years ago and they had the misfortune of signing a lease in one of the buildings on the north side of Sunset in the La Cienega area. And if you don’t know Sunset in La Cienega, it is a very busy these are 2 very busy streets.
Max: 12:04 La Cienega is a multilane highway, and Sunset Boulevard here is a multilane highway. And What happened with this client is, they signed in a really pretty building, a really nice building on the north side of the street, and it did not have fiber. It did not service. They’re they’re a media entertainment company. I’ll I’ll say that.
Max: 12:18 So they needed fast access to Internet. If they were on the south side of the street, no problem. The fiber routes were hand on the south side of the street. They were in vaults running along, the south side of the street. So even if they fiber wasn’t currently in the building, it was a relatively easy install on the south side of the street.
Max: 12:32 The north side of the street, not so much. North side of the street required plus sunset to be closed at night in order to trench and put conduit across the street into the north side of the street to build up an a vault and an entrance into the building now I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with permitting and construction on closing a 4 lane street in the middle of the night to trench and put conduit in but it is not a cheap operation so this company instead of spending no money a 30 to 45 day install window and what should have been maybe $2,000 a month in service had a multi month process over $60,000 in construction costs, that they had to split between install fees and and and an amortization schedule and just a huge delay. I mean, I feel like it was, like, 5 or 6 months for them to get service turned on. And the real rub was that they were evaluating office space on the south side of the street that would really factor into that. You know, when you when you look at it and you say, okay.
Max: 13:27 You know, $60,000 plus cost of construction, you know, their carry, you know, per month was probably 3 or $4,000 more offhand from memory than, a a location on the south side of the street. So when you factor that into the least differential, you know, if you’ve got $4,000 and that was just for a single network connection that was not redundant providers. That was just a single provider. They had no redundancy. So when they went to do and shop for redundancy years later, they had the same issue.
Max: 13:50 So massive cost difference in terms of the total total evaluation at least. You know, we this this is easy for us to do. Check before you sign. Like like, this this thing is, you know, hey, Max. We’re we’re thinking about moving into this building or we’ve got 5 buildings that we’re looking at.
Max: 14:03 This is the information you want from your team that’s doing this work for you or it’s evaluating buildings. It says, hey. We’re looking at 5 buildings. We’re considering 5 buildings. And if you’re and if you’re considering 5 buildings and you and and you give us those addresses, we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna say easy easy easy.
Max: 14:17 Not so easy. There is nothing there that is barren wasteland of network capacity. Don’t sign this building. Don’t do this one. Pick one of these 3.
Max: 14:24 Make your life really easy. And if you give that back to the team, you know, doing your real estate and they have that information, they understand that there’s a big difference for operations of, like, oh, we can sign this lease, but it’s gonna take us 6 months plus a ton of money. Either they can put that into their plans and know that we need an allowance for time for network to be brought in before we could start operations. They can factor that into their TI. You know, what’s the TI allowance?
Max: 14:46 It has to factor in the cost of construction. Or they’re gonna come around and say, hey. Look. You know, we need to be in this building up and running within 6 weeks. We can’t do this.
Max: 14:53 We’re not gonna sign this lease. And when they come in back and and tell you that they’ve signed this lease, your life is much easier as well because you don’t have to figure out that you don’t have any options here, and it’s gonna be months before things get turned on. So if you need network for your business, give us a call. It’s really easy for us to do this thing. Just remember there’s only 5 ways to do this.
Max: 15:09 It’s very simple. We have a conversation. You give us the addresses. We go through this list. We say what’s really important to you.
Max: 15:15 What are you trying to achieve? Is it a budget issue? Is it a speed issue? Is it a redundancy issue? Is it a time issue?
Max: 15:19 And based off that, you know, we get down very quickly to a couple of providers and say, these are your options. These are your prices. What do you wanna do? Let’s sign a contract and get this thing rolling for you. I’m Max Clark.
Max: 15:30 Hopefully, that was less than 20 minutes, and it helps you out.
