Getting internet is maybe the first thing you do, but also perhaps the most forgettable thing you do. When we moved to our newest office early last year in downtown SF, we asked our building management what could be set up the fastest and the answer was “Comcast”. No problem, we had used Comcast before in our old office and they had provided decent download speeds, so we went for it. We installed our old networking gear (Linksys Velop) and Comcast came and installed a “business” class modem.
As Luma grew, we started running in to more and more issues with “the internet”. It started simple enough, such as a sales rep saying their call quality wasn’t great or an engineer saying that pulls out of Github were taking a long time. But always we had full signal strength on our Wifi.
The quickest first fix was simply to swap out our consumer networking gear with Cisco Meraki hardware (quick aside: fantastic product, 100% worth the money). Moving to enterprise networking hardware got rid of random packet losses, huge random slowdowns, random office-wide outages. Phew, problem solved.
But while the above got better, we didn’t solve the issue all our latency sensitive apps (like Zoom, RingCentral, any and all VoIP apps). We had configured our Meraki to guarantee QoS for that traffic, but no dice. So we went back to square one and started the process to get a fibre optic line brought in to the office.
Doing the install took about three months of various site visits, riser installs, etc but in the end the quality of a fibre product for an office cannot be understated. All of our internet issues were “fixed”, nobody has had any issues with “the internet”, and people are much happier and less frustrated day to day. The speeds are slightly more expensive than the Comcast coax products, but it’s well worth it if you get happy employees out of it. We did keep a downgraded Comcast line around as a backup on