A Dangerous Business

04. August 2011 Internet Security 0
”It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, you know that Bilbo is giving Frodo good advice. For you and I, or our businesses ...

Importance of Low Latency Internet Connection

I received a call today from a Vancouver Systems Integrator, one of our value-added partners. The customer, whose main office was in Victoria, also had branch locations in Toronto and Vancouver. They also had some of their critical applications hosted on servers located in a Vancouver Co-location facility. The problem was in their Toronto office, ...

How Big is Big? How Fast is Fast?

One of the best days of my life was flying over the Grand Canyon in a small Cessna.  You’ve  seen pictures or film of the Grand Canyon, but seeing it up close from a low flying plane is a whole different experience, one I heartily recommend  adding to your list of things to do. Hoover Dam ...

Provisioning ADSL Services

Skyway West Provisioning facilitates the setup and startup of your Business ADSL Services provided by Skyway West. First, an order is placed with Telus to either add ADSL to your existing single business phone line, or install a “Dry” copper cable. Added to your line, you are able to use the line simultaneously for voice ...

More than just Internet Bandwidth

Skyway West will soon be rolling out a 15.0 Mbps ADSL service for BC and Alberta businesses.  However we are finding that just increasing the speed of your Internet connection will not always increase the performance of business applications. For example, businesses are adding SIP trunking and unlike web surfing, applications like Voice over IP ...

Essential reading on TCP/IP networking

While working in the ISP industry in Vancouver I’ve often been in situations where quickly diagnosing a problem depends on a solid understanding of the network protocols in use.  Over the years I’ve come across a few resources that have really proved to be invaluable for my understanding of network protocols.  Perhaps the most important ...

The SPIN on SPIM

A famous advertising slogan of past years was AT&T’s “Reach Out and Touch Someone”, first heard in 1979! For our younger viewers (jk), I’ll explain: It promoted Long Distance calling, which was indeed expensive… a direct dialed Vancouver to New York call was around $4 bucks a minute in those days, and most calls had ...

Wes’ ISP Support Blog

05. July 2011 Internet Support 0
Hi, and welcome to the first entry of my new blog. Here I’ll be looking back over the last ten years I’ve worked with Skyway West and talk about challenges I have had and how I was able to overcome them. Along the way I’ll see about slipping in a few tasty tidbits along the ...