Help me get an internet connection!

August 7, 2008 11:19 AM

Desperate for a quick solution for internet connectivity.

I head up IT at my company. The company is moving to a new building tomorrow morning. The telecom company that we signed up with has royally screwed us, so we will have no internet (DS3) for 3 more weeks (we ordered this back in April). We have already delayed our move twice due to this issue and we can't delay anymore. The wireless provider we are currently with could move our dish in a few hours, but the new location has no line of sight to their tower. This also rules out any Pringles can wireless (too many TALL trees) so, screwed there too. This area has exceptionally poor cell service (all providers), so using EVDO or 3G to bridge the gap won't work. That leaves me with the only live communication ports available in the building: 2 POTS lines. Does anyone know of a dialup ISP that will provision a static IP? Or, some way to get DSL turned up FAST? If I can't get a static, I'll just setup dynamic dns.

We're moving all of our servers tomorrow. Mail is hosted in house. I would leave the mail server in the old facility until we have the new data line in, but the Exchange server needs the PDC for authentication, and I need to bring the PDC with me I'm a *nix guy thrown into the WIndows Server world, so I'm terrified of destroying the AD structure). So, I need SOME type of net connection so that we can, at the very least, get email flowing.

Sorry for the frantic nature of this, but this move is killing me.

posted by Cat Pie Hurts to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Is this new building in Waltham, MA? I know nothing about the area or who provides DSL there, but you might get better answers if the location were clarified.

Good luck, and don't panic.
posted by contraption at 11:45 AM on August 7, 2008

Residential DSL can get provisioned within a day so I don't see why you couldn't get a residential-grade DSL line provisioned for Monday. it depends on where the phone lines go though - if they're AT&T just give them a call.
posted by GuyZero at 11:49 AM on August 7, 2008

Do you have any neighboring businesses that you could temporarily lease some bandwidth from? You should be able to, worst case, get some wireless equipment going between a couple buildings and set up QoS according to what you can work out with them so you don't disrupt their business.
posted by boba at 12:10 PM on August 7, 2008

Two way satellite-you don't need line of sight to a tower, just a view of the Southern sky. The latency will be something in excess of 150 milliseconds, but it can be set up in an afternoon and there are a lot of providers.
posted by tesseract420 at 4:53 PM on August 7, 2008

Response by poster: contraption, GuyZero - Bedford, MA, actually. I tried several DSL providers and none could get things up in less than a week. As for panicking, I think I'm beyond panic at this point and in that blissful state that exists between caught in headlights and being smooshed by the bus!

boba - I tried (oh, how I tried!). All of our neighbor's have said no. Thanks neighbors.

tesseract420 - I don't know why I didn't even consider satellite. I'm going to give Hughes a call first thing.

Thanks for the help. We now have a few things on the table:
Our wireless provider is coming out again this morning to resurvey, hoping for clearer weather.
The CEO of my company lambasted POS telecom, and after much fist waving, got them to rush splitting our voice T1 into data and voice temporarily (but we still don't trust them as they have yet to come through on any commitment.) I'm still expecting to have to do the dialup, though.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 1:47 AM on August 8, 2008

There are point to point laser and microwave links you can explore, but this isn't really fast or cheap ... there's even DIY plans for laser links.
posted by bhance at 7:17 PM on August 9, 2008

Also - be aware that a lot of those satellite providers have daily/hourly bandwidth caps ...
posted by bhance at 7:29 PM on August 9, 2008