Telecom construction requires communications across multiple teams. The construction of a new structure, whether office building or data center, is contingent upon access to telecommunications services. Folks in facilities, IT, operations, and administration need to be in lockstep with their vendors and contractors, as well as, their end-users or employees.

Technology has a huge impact on the day to day operations of any organization and that technology’s ability to connect is essential to a high performing company. A translator between all parties is a valuable asset. The ability to pragmatically explain why something is necessary, where it is necessary, and when it is necessary to a broad audience makes things move more seamlessly.

For example, explaining the difference between shared and dedicated services and their pricing delta can be difficult to understand especially when you get to the part where you have to explain that layer 3 technology is “best effort”. In the nineties, IT had carte blanche but that’s changed. People only needed to know their job, today everyone needs to know a little bit about IT but the decisions should be made by the experts. Check out some of my thoughts on the IT buying process.

The WAN to LAN connection is handled by different parties that speak different languages and have different requirements. What the LEC or MSO requires for service is wholly separate from that which low voltage cabling contractors need to set up a WAN. Making matters more complex, finance and IT have their own languages as does legal… as does the carrier’s billing team. At CloudOgre, we sync up with the various departments within the carriers to make sure billing is accurate.

Although the final outcome is the same for all parties involved, they each have their own individual goals. Juggling expectations and synchronizing partners, vendors, and contractors has a huge impact on the outcome. That juggling is contingent upon good communication, although everyone’s goals may be different, they have to be on the same page.

On a day to day basis these folks, whether operations, finance, IT, or the C-Levels, use their own unique language. Building is much different than an office move and has its own set of issues. Coordination with towns’ and cities’ zoning and permitting departments can have its own set of communication barriers.

It brings me great joy to make office moves and new building construction project go smoothly. We’re able to add a great deal of value for our clients by syncing up with all parties involved. Since most of our customers come to us with office move or construction projects we’ve gained a great deal of expertise. You’ll move your office once every five years at most while do this multiple times per year, every year.

Shifts in location, whether moving an office or building a new one, is a great time to discuss changes in IT strategy because users are usually ready to accept behavioral change since its associated with a physical change. Its easier to get used to the buttons on a new phone if you’re also getting used to a new laptop or tablet. CloudOgre evaluates various equipment vendors and SaaS providers and gives recommendations that can be understood by finance, IT, facilities, or anyone who takes a look. CloudOgre isn’t a Panasonic dealer, Grandstream dealer, AT&T provider, we work across all carriers, equipment manufacturers, data center providers, and SaaS vendors to develop the right solution much like a Virtual CIO.

The IT discussion should start as soon as you know you’re going to make a big change. Facilities should be in lockstep with IT from the beginning not only about infrastructure availability but building composition, and other ancillary items that don’t fall in ITs wheelhouse but has an impact on their performance.

Biometrics, passwords, and access cards

Multi-factor authentication is all about what you know, have, and are. I’ll explain more shortly but for now, let’s start with your user name and password, both of which are things you know. What happens if someone knows what you know?

Authentication itself is a complex issue. What happens if you forget what you know? When you forget your password you request a new one but the generation of that new password and the requested access creates a backdoor. For hardware like routers and firewalls, there is usually an admin password set by the factory that should be changed.

Hardware comes with the ability to get access via something you have, physical access to the equipment. If that hardware had a biometric fingerprint scanner it would also incorporate something you are.

Phone systems typically have multifactor authentication in that they use a username, password, and a one-time token sent via text or email. A few years back I recall a client asking for multifactor authentication for a UCaaS system and the options were very limited.

Are you sick of getting robocalls?

Today toll fraud is on the rise, Robocalls are calling every phone I have non-stop to sell or scam me in multiple languages, and cloud phone providers are merging so quickly that security is becoming more and more of a concern.

Admin permissions changing hands at the carrier level are certainly a cause for concern. We’ve experienced widespread carrier outages whose RFO doesn’t make sense leaving us as SMEs to wonder what’s going on behind the curtain.

Phone systems should incorporate biometrics to further ensure security of the end users. It seems simpler and more effective than ‘something you have’ like having to use an access card to use the phone.

Users don’t necessarily want to trade ease of use for security. How hard would it be to adopt a habit of verifying your credentials prior to using the phone? We’ve easily adopted to doing so with our cellphones but would we with our social media? How about our desk phone at work? It truly depends on the organization but recent grads seem to be more likely to adopt new habits technologically.

Spoofing of numbers is the factor that allows RoboCalls to continue. Amit Pai and the FCC are working on a framework to end Robocalls using a new SHAKEN framework.  We can stop it by policing voice traffic at the carrier level and adding an element of authentication but that’s unlikely. Another way to patrol this traffic at the carrier level is to block systems that are making multiple calls per second which would anger call centers and that’s also unlikely. So, since you can’t stop spoofing, preventing toll fraud is your next best option.  You can do that by using multifactor authentication.

https://youtu.be/xVDFixCVWug

Although, there are very limited options for handsets that incorporate biometrics I suspect that that won’t be the case in the near future. Just as multifactor authentication was adopted so will biometrics. Question is, will that happen before cell phones increase their functionality and render deskphones obsolete.

If you’re interested in learning more about phone systems with biometric fingerprint scanners, contact us here.

Fiber optic construction in cities can be especially challenging. As a native New Yorker, I’m used to seeing construction taking place everywhere. Streets are constantly trenched, repaired, retrenched and re-repaired to manage the inner workings of the city. Verizon or Empire City Subway is always doing something.

My Dad laid a lot of the fiber and copper throughout the five boroughs and I manage the projects to get trucks rolling for the big build outs. Again, fiber optic construction in cities can be tricky. Whether moratorium’s when work is halted, like during the holidays, or changes in codes and permitting there’s a lot to manage. Making matters worse, if you’re worried about stuff like this, you probably have a lot of other stuff going on like moving or purchasing office furniture, equipment, networking gear, personnel, phones, etc.

Breaking ground in Chicago

Last year we were in Chicago for the Data Center World conference at the Art Institute where we presented our value add. Although our sponsorship of happy hour was surely a value add, our true value as displayed is to manage complex migrations for large organizations. Whether building a new office, moving your office, migrating your data center, or moving to more of a hybrid architecture, you’re going to want to work with folks that have done this a few times in the past.

While in Chicago we worked with a few carriers on a fiber optic construction project to build out to our site and extend the fiber into and up one of the larger buildings on LaSalle. Of course, we had diversity coming into the building from diverse carriers with route and pop diversity. Once in the building, working with the union to extend the circuit was a breeze. The union managed everything past the zero manhole making the fiber optic construction a breeze. Chicago, because of its extensive financial markets, has a huge demand for telecom related services to connect to exchanges for trade execution, market data from Bloomberg or Reuters, and basic phones and internet.

Fiber Termination – Chicago – Building Demark

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a business leader say, “It only takes a couple of days at home for Joe’s Cable Co to move my service”. It’s easy to mistake the complexity of full duplex, dedicated bandwidth for the cable internet you have at home. They’re not the same. The internet we provide is what would power a whole neighborhood, so it takes a little longer to engineer paths for data to hit the POP. Even in a LIT building and no circuit extension needed there’s still work to do and some of it is outside of the carriers hands being forced to rely on the landlord, town, or even organizations like ARINs who supplies your IP addresses. Laying the fiber optic cables themselves is one piece of the puzzle, they still need to be engineered and designed to connect to the WAN.

Rural areas present their own set of challenges with the distances between sites a minor problem in comparison to the terrain itself. The right rock will make the wrong blade useless in an instant. Trees, turns, animals, rivers, etc. will also throw a monkey wrench in your plans in a rural area. Reliable power at all of these intersections is also a must. These issues don’t care if you’re using Agile or Waterfall framework because you’re probably not agile enough to get that fiber through that waterfall. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing more companies use solar and line of site to extend networks past their wired capacity and further bridging the urban-rural divide.

We’re in the manholes and up on the poles laying fiber both aerially and terrestrially, trenching up the ground to connect companies to the world. Our partners at AT&T, Comcast Business, Altice, Crown Castle, Zayo, CenturyLink, Spectrum, Frontier, Verizon, British Telecom, and many others come to us to coordinate with customers, landlords, property managers, and others that have roles in the install process.