Networking

Remember when landlines still ruled the land, before smartphones were sophisticated pocket broadband machines? There was a time when telephone handsets were essential business gear, when we put a phone near every chair in the house. Those were the days, my friend. Those were the days. Now, however, welcome to 2021. You know the story. COVID-19, lockdowns, shelter-in-place, the rise of work-from-home, offices deserted in favor of newly remote workers. We’re in something of a halfway place, where vaccines are helping some folks return to work, while other businesses are still on lockdown. To say life is unpredictable is an epic understatement.For many companies, especially those that had already gone through their own digital transformation, business was pretty much as usual. Their teams communicate via Slack or Teams, set up Zoom meetings four times a day, and create email chains and threads that can make you question the meaning of life. But those aren’t the companies and individuals we’re addressing. In this article, we’re talking to companies that still have a handset on every desk (but now the desks are at home), still do business by talking on the phone (really, some folks do that), and who route calls and transfer to extensions (which now have to traverse the planet instead of the building). For those of you, there are VoIP (Voice over IP) solutions that allow you to run a PBX in the cloud, and connect employees working from home just as if they were wired into the on-premises phone switch. Here are 12 solutions that should help you stay connected.

The most-mentioned VoIP provider among our quick surveys

RingCentral

When I started asking around about VoIP providers, RingCentral was the one mentioned the most. RingCentral offers solutions for small vendors all the way up through giant enterprises, and it also has a focus on developer integration, allowing external vendors to hook into the RingCentral environment in new and creative ways.Their core product is RingCentral Office, which offers all the key virtual PBX features, including auto-attendant, company directory, call forwarding and handling, and multiple extensions. Additional programs provide voice mail, call forwarding, fax, and meetings and webinars. RingCentral has a nice iOS and Android app that allows you to turn your smartphone into what seems like a more traditional office phone for callers.

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Add a second line to your mobile phone and then just keep expanding and expanding

Line2

Don’t want to give our your personal mobile number to customers and clients, but also don’t want to carry a second phone? Consider Line2 which — wait for it — adds a second line to your phone.Actually, Line2 offers a bit more. It moves the traditional hard-wired on-premises PBX to the cloud and moves the dedicated PBX handsets into your team’s smartphones. You can assign additional phone numbers to phones, transfer calls between team members, set up an auto-attendant function to annoy callers while sounding official. You can even turn your team into a virtual call center with the ability to dynamically distribute calls to agents.

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Keep the in-office feel, but at home

Intermedia

We last included Intermedia in our best email hosting services roundup, and now it’s back in our VoIP list. Intermedia actually offers a number of unified communications products including virtual PBX, SIP trunking, and various conferencing apps. In this roundup, we’re looking at the company’s combined system, Intermedia Unite.While Intermedia Unite recommends mostly Polycom, Cisco, and Yealink VoIP phones, the company’s Anyphone BYOP (bring your own phone) program allows certain other devices to connect into the Intermedia VoIP environment. In terms of features, this is enterprise VoIP with all the fixin’s. As you might imaging from a vendor we recommended as a leading email host provider, Intermedia Unite has strong ties to Office 365 and Workspace (formerly G Suite) as well as Slack and Salesforce.In pandemic times, the ability for workers to bring their desk phones home, plug them into their home Internet, and still have a receptionist capability that allows AAs and operators to view the availability of everyone in their organization, perform blind transfers, warm transfers, and transfers to voicemail — all remotely — is a huge boon.

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An old-school global PBX provider who has successfully pivoted to VoIP

Mitel

Founded in 1973, Mitel is an old-school traditional PBX provider that has successfully made the pivot to VoIP. Here’s a fun story. Mitel was founded by Canadians Michael Cowpland and Terry Matthews, and as the story goes, is a portmanteau derived from “Mike and Terry Lawnmowers.”Since its pivot, Mitel has been mowing through acquisitions, including handset maker Polycom in 2016 and ShoreTel in 2017. While the company does provide small, medium, and enterprise solutions, it’s the enterprise offerings that stand out. Mitel, for example, provides the unified communications network for Major League Baseball and its 30 clubs.

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This isn’t your grandma’s VoIP provider (anymore)

Vonage

It would be pretty hard to do a list of VoIP providers without including Vonage. While the company made its name in home-based VoIP solutions, it also dominated the news for less savory reasons. Its IPO, partially funded by customers whose investment crashed, was named one of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for 2006. Its then CEO couldn’t preside over the public offering because of previous encounters with the SEC. Around the same time, a jury found Vonage guilty of infringing on patents from Verizon, Sprint Nextel, AT&T, and Nortel. And, on top of all that, Vonage was sued by 32 states and had to pay seven states’ legal costs for confusing business practices, refusing to make refunds, and so-called “free” services.So, how could we possibly recommend Vonage? Well, since 2019, it has been working hard to rebrand itself as a B2B cloud services provider with a conversations API (applications programming interface) designed to allow enterprises and developers to create communications containers within their apps. Vonage’s One Vonage platform integrates unified communications, programmable communications, and contact center operations on top of the public cloud infrastructure and across the vonage global carrier network.Gone are the days when you might try to set up a Vonage account for grandma. But if you’re a business working on a unified communications infrastructure, you might want to give Vonage a look.

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A comprehensive offering with solid international cred

8×8

8×8 is often classified as a small business VoIP provider, but that doesn’t do the company credit. Formed back in 1987, it was originally a chip design firm. Through acquisitions and product pivots, it has acquired video conferencing products, VoIP technologies, a contact center company, open source chat software, and CPaaS (communications platform as a service) technology. As of 2019, the company had been awarded 128 patents in the areas of semiconductors, video processing algorithms, computer architecture, and more.The company still appeals to small businesses with its basic cloud PBX plans. The company offers some low-cost international plans that appeal to those who need to connect around the world. It’s possible to move up to all-in-one voice, video, and chat, and then really grow into contact center capabilities, adding in analytics and collaboration. Underlying all of this are API options that can be tapped either by your own in-house custom solutions or a hefty variety of cloud integrations.

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That old landline feel from a very modern Internet-connected box

Ooma

There was a point back in 2011 when my business phone was all about Ooma. For years, I was pre-smartphone. I ran a business from home, which meant I had to manage both personal lines and business lines. History note: Back in the olden days, people had actual wires run into the house for phones, and then throughout the house to handsets. Unfortunately, the old twisted copper wires started getting worse and worse, as landline carriers lost interest in POTS (plain old telephone service) lines. So, wanting to keep the feel of a phone at every seat (which seems so bizarre to me now), we used an Ooma box as our gateway between our Internet connection and physical handsets.I finally dropped Ooma when the complexity got out of control (and didn’t work). It also didn’t help that my wife hated the complexity of the system. As I described in an article back in 2014, “In any case, I’d had it with the excessive level of complexity our phone system required. I had both an Ooma and an AT&T Microcell taking up ports on the router. I had a Link-to-Cell handset base station plugged into the Ooma. I had a ton of power cords and power dongles going under the desk. And it was all unreliable, cranky, and in need of more duct tape.”I eventually dumped it all in favor of an iPhone and Apple Watch. Rather than having a handset at every seat, I just wear the watch which allows me to answer calls anywhere. But the Ooma still gets used by my ZDNet buddy Jason Perlow (although less so now that he has to Zoom everywhere). Jason, too, adopted the Ooma.But what of today? Should you consider Ooma in 2021? Yes. Ooma has not stood still since I used it. They’ve moved strongly into the enterprise world, expanded their handset offerings, and expanded their service offerings. What I always liked about Ooma was their clear management interface and a wide range of customizable options. Those exist and have been expanded on considerably. The company has also integrated a home security offering into their main system, with motion sensors, window sensors, and water sensors.Here’s my bottom line: If you still like the landline feel, multiple lines, and dedicated handsets, Ooma is a good place to go. 

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Unified communications from the folks who make GoToMeeting

LogMeIn

There is nothing about GoToConnect’s corporate parentage that won’t give you a headache. GoToConnect is part of the line of products that include GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Near the top of the corporate chain is LogMeIn, which acquired what was then called GetGo, a spin-off containing the GoTo products from Citrix. LogMeIn itself was acquired by private equity firms Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital in 2019.While GoTo is not the company’s name, they do business under the GoTo logo and goto.com URL. This hurts even more because GoTo.com was once part of Yahoo and Overture Services. In fact, back in the late 1990s, Goto.com was one of the most popular search engine destinations and somewhere along the way, the domain made its way to LogMeIn. To make the brain box bang even more, GoToConnect was previously known as Jive Communications, not to be confused with Jive Software, which provides an intranet collaboration solution owned by Aurea.So, now that we’ve covered GoToConnect’s family tree, let’s talk about the offerings. First, of course, is its tight connection with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, video offerings almost as well known as Zoom in this pandemic-wacky world. Of particular interest is how well done GoToConnects administrative management tools are, allowing drag-and-drop setup of powerful automated assistant and call forwarding business logic.The company offers just about everything you’d need for a business PBX, implemented with tight integration to other cloud services like Salesforce, Zoho, Google, Slack, and Microsoft. First and foremost, if you’re a GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar company, you’ll want to consider GoToConnect. But if you want to build out an Internet-first PBX environment, give GoToConnect a look.

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Any easy solution for fixed-cost extension expansion

LogMeIn

I wasn’t familiar with Grasshopper but kept bumping into it as I researched this article. And, wouldn’t you know it? It’s also owned by LogMeIn. Think of it as the cuter little cousin of GoToConnect.What stood out about Grasshopper was its very manageable billing structure for small businesses. While the company offers one number, three extension plan and a three number, six extension plan, the winner here is the five number, unlimited extension plan for $80 a month. This is per-month, per-user. It’s just per month. So if you have a growing small company and you want a virtual PBX with a few numbers (like one for main, one for sales, one for support, etc), and an extension for every employee then, boom! Eighty bucks a month. If you hire more people, don’t sweat it. You’re just budgeting that one $80 per month fee.What Grasshopper doesn’t have is any original equipment. You provide your own phones or mobile devices. Then you get the usual VoIP, call forwarding, voicemail, extensions, transfers, and so on. There are no call center options, though, so if you’re building out a major call center, you might want a different solution. But if you want a fixed-budget PBX that can generally scale without added cost, hop on over to Grasshopper.

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Phone service integrated with Nomorobo

1-VoIP

At first glance, 1-VoIP looks like almost any other business phone service. Want to pay for metered calls? Check. Don’t want to pay for metered calls? Add a few bucks a month, and then check. Want to pay by extension added? Check. Want to pay to effectively rent a handset? Check.Look, 1-VoIP does the deal, but it’s not a great deal. It supports many of the business phone features you want, like music on hold, extension transfer, queues, auto-attendant, virtual fax, forwarding, and all the rest. Yada-yada-yada.We were ready to dismiss this as a yawn when we stumbled on its killer feature: integration with Nomorobo. If you’re not familiar with Nomorobo, it blocks most incoming spam calls. On individual smartphones, it’s an app that’s a bit of a hack. You have to route all your calls through Nomorobo, and it then passes them back to you. That adds delays and annoyance to your callers. But with 1-VoIP, Nomorobo is integrated into the virtual PBX. That means that if you’re using a real operator rather than a virtual attendant, you won’t be harassed with all those incoming calls. It’s a well-done feature for a PBX.

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Middle of the ground VoIP with a stand-out option: a real human answering the phone

Phone.com

When I started my first company, few people worked from home. Businesses expected to call into companies and get live receptionists (yes, this was the dark ages). As one of my first startup activities, I wound up contracting with a local answering service, shunting all my calls to them, and they would then call me back to transfer the call to me. It was a pain, but it got me deals I otherwise would have had no hope of getting.Today, of course, we’re all used to email, texting, web forms, and social media. Calling into a business is far more rare. But there are still old school industries for whom a live attendant would be a key business option. Although most of Phone.com’s plans are pretty much middle of the road, with relatively low-end pricing, the real attention-getter was their definitely-not-cheap plans that included a live attendant answering the phone. That real human can then transfer to an extension or a mobile phone, sent to voicemail, set up appointments, and follow a script.Feel free to check out Phone.com for their run-of-the-mill unified communications offerings. But if you want an integrated solution with a real human answering the phone, definitely give Phone.com a look.

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Every broadband provider, ever Everyone will upsell you VoIP capabilities When considering a VoIP option, don’t forget your broadband or telecommunications provider. Nearly every cable service and phone service (including Verizon, AT&T, and all the traditional providers) offer VoIP services. In fact, many of them push those services so hard, it’s often difficult getting cable modem service without spending a whole lot of extra time talking agents out of the VoIP upsell. That said, don’t dismiss your broadband provider out of hand in favor of the players we outlined above. Most broadband VoIP providers have their services (and rented equipment, naturally) well integrated into their overall offerings, which means that you get a one-stop shop for both data and voice. Solutions are often easy to implement because the cable installer will set up your VoIP for you, and you usually don’t have to make any challenging hardware decisions.

A few years back, my octogenarian Dad refused to use a smartphone and wanted wired telephony. But POTS was no longer available in his area. I made one call to his local cable provider and the installer showed up, set it up, and taught him how to use it. It was about the easiest network install ever, and by far the easiest network install for my dad. Whether you’re looking for residential VoIP just for personal use, residential VoIP extended for a new work-at-home life, or business VoIP, give your already-embedded provider a fair look. Our processThis one took a little creativity. I haven’t touched an RJ-11 jack in six years or so. That said, I did a whole lot of VoIP setup back in the day, and I worked with a number of the vendors listed here. To expand on that list, I reached out to telecommunications managers I know and asked them for their recommendation. Most of them had also left VoIP in the deep dark past and were spending their time dealing with mobile device management issues and app deployment.

But some of them still had old-school customers, old-school managers, or old-school business practices that benefited more from a unified phone system than a wide scattering of tweaked up smartphones. The companies listed here are mostly derived from their recommendations. I want to mention one such company — although I won’t mention them by name. This company got an honorable mention from a few of the professionals I talked to, but some of the details were hazy. I reached out via the company’s pop-up chat box and was pleased to reach a human rather than a bot. Five minutes later, after trying to get details on the company’s competitive advantages, I was asked “Do you need VOIP services or not?” The agent got ruder from that point on. So that company is getting no mention here at all.  And this is a lesson to companies: Be careful if you offer a chat option on your website. If your agents are unpleasant, you might lose opportunities. I just pulled a company out of a “best of 2020” list because their operator was impatient and rude — and therefore not qualified to be considered “best of” anything. How to chooseThe single most important thing to do is identify your needs clearly. Do you need extension forwarding? Do you need voicemail? Do you need a human attendant or will an automated attendant do? What apps do you need to integrate into? Make a full laundry list of requirements and desirables. Then start shopping the list.  If I were doing it, I’d set up a spreadsheet with all the factors I needed, and then I’d cross-index each vendor’s offerings in the spreadsheet. When done with my research, I would probably be able to see who came closest to my needs. Remember that price may be an issue, but it’s far from the only issue. Don’t focus on saving a few bucks a month if your phone system is your primary link to revenue-generating customers. Make sure you’re able to provide the phone service your customers expect, because that’s how it will pay for itself. What about you? Are you still using landlines, handsets, or VoIP? Let us know in the comments below.

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Verizon Business and RingCentral launched a strategic partnership that will co-brand and integrate RingCentral’s unified communication as a service (UCaaS) with Verizon services. Under the partnership, the two companies will launch RingCentral wtih Verizon. RingCentral will be a part of Verizon Business’ network-as-a-service effort that covers everything from 5G to edge computing and services. Those network services from Verizon will be combined with RingCentral’s cloud communications platform, which includes Message Video Phone. RingCentral’s competition in UCaaS includes Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom, 8×8, Google, LogMein and Vonage among others.Verizon Business with RingCentral is designed to address the new normal of work and collaboration. RingCentral with Verizon will give customers one point of contact for deployments as well as integration with CRM, industry-specific apps and APIs. Partnerships like the one with Verizon Business have given RingCentral fuel for growth. For the first quarter, RingCentral reported revenue of $352 million, up 32% from a year ago. RingCentral Office (a combination of UCaaS and Cloud communications as a service) saw growth of 40%. RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis said the first quarter growth was driven by a wide range of partnerships with Avaya, Atos, AT&T, BT and Telus. “We believe we are witnessing the intersection of two megatrends of digital transformation and hybrid workforce adoption, which is creating a structural shift in awareness and demand for cloud communications solutions,” said Shmunis.RingCentral broke even for the first quarter and non-GAAP earnings were 27 cents a share. For 2021, RingCentral said revenue will be between $1.5 billion to $1.51 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $1.24 a share to $1.27 a share.

“We think that we’ve proven RingCentral to be a very good partner to many of the industry players, starting with the traditional channel, extending into carriers or global service providers,” said Shmunis.  More

At home, an internet outage is an annoyance, but nothing more. Aside from interrupting whatever you’re watching on Netflix, a brief break in online access for an hour or two is no big deal. At your business, on the other hand, even an hour-long outage can have serious repercussions on productivity and profits. That’s why, when you’re looking for an internet service provider for your small business, you should look for more than just high speeds and low prices. Reliability is at the absolute top of the list, backed up by service level agreements that clearly spell out what you’re buying. That’s followed closely by support, which should be available 24/7 and knowledgeable enough to quickly handle problems so an outage doesn’t ruin your day. Business internet providers offer a feature set that consumer cable companies won’t touch, including upload speeds that are as fast as download speeds, a detail that matters for design firms that routinely exchange massive video and CAD files with remote business partners. Prices are, unsurprisingly, higher than corresponding consumer plans but typically include no data caps. Using dedicated IP addresses, you can keep a permanent high-speed connection to a branch office or run your own public-facing server. Neither of those scenarios are possible (or advisable) with a consumer-focused internet plan. And business internet providers typically offer attractive add-ons like email and phone service for a relatively small surcharge. For this guide, we’ve focused on large, nationwide internet providers in the United States. Depending on where your office is located, you might be able to find excellent local and regional options, but we don’t have the space or the bandwidth to track down the hundreds of options in that category.

Premium services at premium prices

As one of two Tier 1 internet providers in this list (the other is AT&T), Verizon has more control over its network than competitors that have to purchase access from upstream providers. Fios is a fiber-based service that is available in three tiers, starting at 100 Mbps and going up to 940/880 Mbps, at prices ranging from $69 to $249 per month. The highest-priced plan include a single digital voice line for your business as well, and you can get additional discounts for bundling with Verizon Wireless plans or Fios TV. Verizon also offers Internet Dedicated Services, at speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps, with the fastest connection costing $855 per month with a three-year commitment. For an extra charge, you can add 4G LTE wireless backup, which will keep critical services like point of sale systems running in the event of an outage. Unlike some of its competitors, Verizon charges additional fees for equipment and some services, so be sure to include the full list of charges when comparing prices. 

View Now at Verizon Business

Best for those who want to create a custom package

As one of the biggest brands on the internet and a Tier 1 provider, AT&T offers a dizzying array of options, with broadband, wireless, and Dedicated Internet plans available for the choosing. Special terms and pricing are available for government agencies, schools, and libraries. Wired broadband plans start at $40 per month, with wireless backup available as an option. Wireless plans begin at $80 a month and top out at 100 Mbps speeds. Dedicated Internet access, offering speeds of up to 1 Tbps with traffic prioritization, will cost at least $550 per month and can run into the thousands of dollars monthly for a Gigabit connection. Although you can start your search online, getting a detailed price quote means filling in an online form or speaking with a sales rep. 

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For best rates, you’ll need to sign a two-year contract

Comcast Business, unlike its consumer cousin, has no data caps, and it offers dedicated, round-the-clock support for business customers. But this is still Comcast, as you’ll realize when you discover that the best prices require a two-year contract. Expect to pay $80 to $500 per month for download speeds starting at 35 Mbps and going up to 1 Gbps. In our review of Comcast Business pricing, we found that internet packages that bundled a single phone line were actually cheaper than the internet-only versions. For the first two years, at least. Comcast offers a slew of add-ons for business customers, including Wi-Fi options to secure your corporate network from the one you allow guests to use, as well as a backup option called Connection Pro, that provides a 4G LTE modem with battery reserve for up to 8 hours, so you can maintain connectivity in the event of an outage. If those speeds are too sluggish, you can get Ethernet dedicated internet, with symmetrical download/upload speeds up to 100 Gbps and two permanent IP addresses. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) router is optional. Be prepared to pay, though. 

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Best for those looking for a low-priced bundle

As expected from a division of cable giant Charter Communications, Spectrum Business plans come with a dizzying array of prices that vary based on contract length and whether you’ve bundled phone or TV service with your internet access. Speeds range from 200 Mbps to 940 Mbps, at prices from $65 to $250 per month with a 12- or 24-month contract. The entry level plan includes domain name registration and email service, with higher-priced plans bundling voice service as well. Add-ons include a $20-per-month Wireless Internet Backup plan, static IP addresses (1 for $15, up to 29 addresses for $60 monthly), and a variety of Wi-Fi options. 

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Fiber performance, if you live in their coverage area

Frontier’s network covers huge swaths of the United States, including the Southwest from California to Texas, the entire Southeast, and every state that borders the Great Lakes, including Illinois and New York. There are some noteworthy gaps in the coverage map, however, including the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, Virginia/Maryland/D.C, and the upper Northeast from Massachusetts to Maine. Frontier’s claim to fame is its 100% fiber-optic network, which allows it to offer upload speeds that are as fast as downloads, depending on the plan. That’s the same network that Frontier’s consumer customers use. Frontier’s website focuses mostly on its consumer offerings and is thin on what it offers business customers, and the only way to get details on a business plan is to call their business sales line. That leads us to believe that the main difference is easier access to support lines. Still, if you’re in Frontier’s service area, it’s probably worth a call to figure out whether their no-contract plans are right for your business. 

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No billing surprises, if you live in the right city

Does Google have a nationwide network? Well … sort of. Google Fiber business plans are available to a large segment of the United States population, but only if you live in one of the 19 cities that are part of the network. You can expect to pay $100 a month for 250 Mbps service and $250 monthly for the 1 Gbps. On Google Fiber plans, upload and download speeds are identical (equipment permitting) and there are no hidden fees or data caps, nor is a contract required. The monthly price includes installation and required networking equipment, although you’re welcome to bring your own router if you prefer.

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What type of internet connection is best for businesses?

For most office-based small businesses, a regular broadband connection with wired access to each desktop or laptop PC is the best choice, and you can easily add wireless connectivity. Businesses that are more spread out, with common areas for customers and employees, might prefer an all-wireless option. Be sure to check the terms of service carefully, however, as some providers restrict access to bars, restaurants, hotels, and other establishments that serve the public. If you data needs are especially demanding, with employees routinely transferring large files or doing HD video streaming, a dedicated connection is pricey but probably worth it.

If you work from home, do you need business internet?

Home-based employees can use large amounts of data, sometimes enough to exceed data caps that are common with consumer internet plans. Paying for unlimited access is usually still cheaper than signing up for a dedicated business plan. Consider a business plan if you need fast upload speeds (most consumer providers limit uploads to a fraction of download speeds) or if you need to run your own server (which is prohibited under the terms of service for most consumer plans).

What internet speed is appropriate for business use?

Each tier of increased speed comes at a higher price, sometimes significantly higher, so it’s important to sign up for only as much bandwidth as you need. For lightweight office use by one or two users plus point-of-sale transactions, even the most modest package will probably do. As you add workers, especially if they routinely transfer large files, you’ll want to expand speeds significantly. Businesses that do intensive work with large files, such as graphic design shops and videographers, should get as much bandwidth as they can afford.

How we narrowed the fieldWe looked at national internet service providers that offer plans dedicated for business use, with support staff that are trained to work with business networks of all sizes. We encourage you to use your local business connections to see if a smaller regional option might be a smaller alternative. All of these plans include 24/7 support, options for dedicated IP addresses, email and security add-ons, and symmetrical upload/download speeds.How to choose a business internet providerStart by using the provider’s online form to see if service is available at your address. If your business is located in space you rent or lease, you’ll also want to check with the owner to confirm that you’re allowed to do any work required as part of the installation. We recommend getting a detailed quote that includes all one-time charges as well as a firm estimate of monthly charges, including taxes and fees. If a long-term contract is required, be sure to find out what the monthly charge will be after the contract ends if you stay on a month-to-month basis. 

Finally, look at any available add-ons, including business phone service, email, wireless backup, and business Wi-Fi that uses secure authentication rather than a simple password. You might find that those options can provide some extra savings and give you a single point of contact for support. 

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When then-President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to destroy net neutrality in 2017, everyone knew that millions of comments in favor of breaking net neutrality were bogus. As then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said at the time, two million net neutrality comments were fake. Schneiderman said: “Moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of our public comment process and reward those who perpetrated this fraud to advance their own hidden agenda.” Schneiderman was wrong. His successor, Letitia James, found after a multi-year investigation that there had been “18 million fake comments with the FCC,” including over 500,000 fake letters sent to Congress in support of the repeal.

Behind this vast majority of this astroturfing campaign was Broadband for America, a marketing group funded by the country’s top ISPs. In classic 1984 doublespeak, it claims to be in favor of net neutrality while, in reality, being a group of its greatest enemies. Its members include AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Comcast, Cox, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and USTelecom-The Broadband Association.James reported: “After a multi-year investigation, we found the nation’s largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to influence the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules — resulting in millions of fake public comments impersonating Americans. These illegal schemes are unacceptable.”Altogether, 80% of all public FCC comments filed on its net-neutrality proposal four years ago came from the scammers. There was never, as Ajit Pai, then-FCC chairman and a former Verizon attorney claimed at the time, any mass support for destroying net neutrality. Pai, after leaving office, was hired as a partner by private equity firm Searchlight Capital Partners, where he works on telecom and ISP acquisitions.  James continued: “The broadband industry hired marketing companies that co-opted and created identities and filed nearly 18 million fake comments with the FCC and sent over half a million fake letters to Congress in support of the repeal. This practice was also used to influence other policies. Today, we stopped three of these marketing companies from continuing their illegal behavior and recommended reforms to stop this type of fraud in the future.”

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These three companies are Fluent, React2Media and Opt-Intelligence. They all settled with the attorney general’s office and agreed to pay fines. They did not, however, admit to any wrongdoing. They did agree to get permission from anyone they quote in the future in comments purporting to represent public opinion. These businesses and at least three other companies were paid $4.2 million by Broadband for America. The investigation into this hack of democracy is still ongoing. Where did the fake comments come from? The Office of the New York Attorney General (OAG) found that Broadband for America couldn’t rely on real grassroots support since the public overwhelmingly supported robust net neutrality. So, it created them via co-registration lead generation. In coregistration, consumers are offered rewards, such as gift cards, sweepstakes entries, or an e-book, for providing personal information and responding to advertisements. These include everything from discounted children’s movies to free trials of products. To conceal the comments’ true source, Broadband for America’s contractors also created web pages for the conservative-leaning advocacy groups. Few comments, however, were submitted via these web pages. But they gave the impression that comments the FCC received came from Trump supporters. In fairness, it wasn’t just the anti-net neutrality forces that generated fake comments. A 19-year-old college student who supported net neutrality filed over 7.7 million pro-neutrality comments with the FCC. Unlike Broadband for America, he didn’t use the names and addresses of real people without their consent. Instead, he automatically created comments using software-generated fake names and addresses. The FCC, in theory, should have been able to spot this activity. In practice, it was clueless and didn’t detect that millions of submissions were coming from a single IP address. The OAG also identified another group of 1.6 million pro-neutrality comments that were submitted using fictitious identities but hasn’t been able to find out where they came from. In the course of the investigation, the OAG found the FCC wasn’t the only one being targeted by big business. The OAG found that fraudulent comment campaigns had also targeted policy decisions at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Energy Management at the US Department of the Interior. Looking ahead, the OAG recommends several reforms to root out the deception and fraud that have infected public policy-making. These areAdvocacy groups to take steps to ensure they have obtained valid consent from an individual before submitting a comment or message to the government on their behalfAgencies and legislatures that manage electronic systems that receive comments and messages to hold advocacy groups and their vendors more accountable for the comments they submit on behalf of individualsLawmakers to strengthen laws to deter the submission of deceptive and unauthorized comments to the governmentAgencies to adopt technical safeguards to protect against unauthorized bulk submissions using automation.Hopefully, all these changes will happen sooner than later. Democracy has enough trouble as it without businesses pretending to be millions of citizens. Related Stories: More

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) was pitched like this: Virtualization can make a selected part of a very broad and distributed data center cloud look like the entirety of an enterprise data center network. Already, this seems like a trick that Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and the others pull off with ease.

“The key element in the MEC architecture is the MEC host,” stated a 2018 white paper published by the European standards group ETSI [PDF]. The paper went on to define a MEC host as “a general-purpose edge computing facility that provides the computing, storage and other resources required by applications such as IoT data preprocessing, VR/AR, video streaming and distribution, V2X, etc.”With a bit of marketing prestidigitation, the telecommunications industry could get into the cloud data center game without having to follow the lead of Equinix, Digital Realty, and their ilk, and enter the commercial real estate market. They could use the real estate they already own or lease for their base transceiver stations (BTS), subdivide their data center installations amongst a plethora of smaller buildings (micro data centers, or µDC), and leverage the fiber optic data network they’re already building to provide the backhaul they need for 5G Wireless, to provide the virtual connections these facilities would need, so they appear contiguous to commercial customers. A highly diversified network of prefabricated tool sheds could appear no different to the customer than a hyperscale cloud facility.Or, as is their wont, telcos may take MEC in an entirely different direction, both physically and virtually speaking. With the flip of a switch called local breakout (LBO) — a physical switch that they own — they could direct traffic into their own facilities, which are not “micro” by any means. Those facilities could then serve as gateways to familiar public cloud services, as has been the case for Verizon with AWS’ Wavelength service since late 2019, and AT&T with Google Cloud the following March.”You have to be able to provide the same types of capabilities you would have in a traditional data center hosting environment,” explained Thierry R. Sender, Verizon’s director of edge computing strategy.  “I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a colo. . . but it’s a full-on data center environment.”To become a phenomenon with anywhere near the scale of cloud computing, edge computing needs to be scalable. Whatever ends up being responsible for orchestrating the system’s workloads needs to perceive the system as a whole as something more than the sum of its parts. That’s hard when your deployment facilities are small by design, and separated by hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable, the vast majority of it linking BTS facilities to one another, rather than customer premises.It might make sense — perhaps — if dozens, and potentially hundreds, of smaller facilities throughout the world were capable of being networked together. You could use every edge collectively like one big cloud, or selectively like a cafeteria, depending upon the requirements of each workload at the time. Or perhaps, alternately, it might be more convenient for telcos in particular if all the edges were conveniently folded into one giant shape, and co-located — to borrow a phrase — in one or two existing facilities.MinionsNot everyone bought into the 5G MEC pitch. An edge-merging capability such as this would need to rely upon a degree of service-provider agnosticism that security-intensive telcos simply cannot permit.

Network slicing is the subdivision of physical infrastructure into virtual platforms, using a technique perfected by telecommunications companies called network functions virtualization (NFV). As originally conceived, NFV was a way for the functions that telcos made available to consumers through their own data networks to become portable and deployable on-demand at or near the customer’s point-of-contact. It was telcos’ first attempt at putting edge computing to work for them.Throughout 2018 and 2019, AT&T executives and engineers declared that slicing their networks into company-owned and customer-leased segments (and reserving NFVs only for the former segment) may have been both legally and technically impossible to achieve. They may have been right. But amid the least hopeful year in many folks’ memories, 2020 gave rise to what seemed to be a workable model for containerized network functions (CNF): a way to orchestrate a highly-distributed, multi-tenant network, Kubernetes-style, whose area maps would look less like stripes than freckles. The open source community could once again hold the key.Surprise: CNF isn’t a dance in the park either. As Kubernetes’ own co-creator Craig McLuckie told me last July for Data Center Knowledge, when realized on a telco scale, CNF would require an entirely different orchestration method than Kubernetes uses for the enterprise — essentially validating AT&T’s earlier objections.Last November, one attempt to derive such a model emerged. Called Clovisor, and championed by a Google software engineer named Stephen Wong, it’s an effort to extend a reliable service mesh between telco networks in such a way that it includes the control plane of the virtual network. This is the part that’s separated from the data plane, and that determines how packets are forwarded, and to where.Stephen Wong,  Google software engineer.”Going back to MEC, or any kind of edge data center or micro data center, you are trying to run single applications, whose components expand across both edge and cloud,” explained Wong, introducing his work during the most recent KubeCon virtual conference. As an example, he cited a machine learning system whose inference engines — the components that determine which parts of the ingested data are worth learning — are distributed across a very broad area, but whose neural net is singular and running on a centralized cloud platform.”It makes a lot of sense to run a single mesh across the cloud and edge sites, for this kind of application,” continued Wong.  “Once you do that, you have a consistent network policy and telemetry model, across single applications.”It’s something MEC’s designers hadn’t yet taken into account when they conceived it during the 4G LTE era: Distributed applications are bigger than networks. You could make a case for slicing telco clouds into strips and apportioning one strip per tenant, if all applications were singular virtual machines — gelatinous blobs traversing network pipes and emerging intact.But what the consumers of a distributed cloud service presently want — and may actually be willing to pay a premium for — is a way to selectively geo-position the pieces of applications that actually need to be distributed — and not the entire package. This would require some type of framework capable of supporting the sum of all infrastructure that hosts any part of a distributed application.Wong points to service mesh as an enterprise-class architecture that enables a mode of service discovery: a way for functions in a network to find one another, connect, and exchange data. Such an architecture makes perfect sense in a world where the enterprise is the entire network. But when the base of the network has to be striped, and then stripes have to be doled out to individual tenants, this particular architecture of service mesh may become not just improbable, but perhaps exactly as impossible as AT&T first suggested.For a network control plane this complex, he explained, it would appear better to have a policy arbiter that’s centralized, making it easier to scale. One project that tried this approach in 2018 was championed by Huawei, as part of a project it marketed at the time as the Service-Oriented Core (SOC). As part of this concept, a system called Clover (from which Clovisor would later flow) would establish a service mesh-based framework that re-envisioned virtual network functions (VNF) not just as CNFs, but as fully-distributed microservices.Slide from a 2018 presentation by Futurewei Technologies, the US-based research arm of Huawei.In a Kubernetes cluster, pods are the containment units for active functions. Clover apportioned each pod its own sidecar, which served as a proxy for communicating with the broader service mesh. Avoiding a re-invention of the proverbial wheel, Clover used the existing Istio service mesh, which uses Envoy sidecars. The telemetry and policy functions for each proxy sidecar would be funneled through an Istio component called Mixer. Deployed cleverly, Mixer could be configured pretty much on-demand, changing its stripes, if you will, to serve a variety of benefactors concurrently. Think of a traffic cop that could change uniforms whenever different districts’ cars showed up at the intersection, and you get a bit of the idea.

If you’re familiar with the kinds of bottlenecks that produce the weakest links in a network, you already see where this discussion is heading.  “Just by hearing that,” said Wong, who served as Clover’s project team leader, “you would know that it’s actually pretty terrible to run that on the edge.”The edge outside the cloudWhen we discussed the topic of 5G MEC last September, we referred to the structure to which it gave rise as an “edge cloud.” As always, there are various permutations as to what that phrase means, depending upon who utters it. But the general idea is, an edge cloud would bring disparate hosts across multiple edges together collectively as a single, variable cluster — as fuzzy as the cloud.It’s much harder to draw a fuzzy analogy than to orchestrate a fuzzy cluster.”The edge — the way I would describe it is as a geo-caching architecture,” explained Vijoy Pandey, Cisco’s vice president of engineering, in a recent interview.  “It’s a set of services, on top of which you can build applications. But what kinds of applications make sense there? The resources that are available to those services, differ widely from a cloud, to on-prem, to all kinds of edge locations all the way down to a camera or phone. So why would I place an application in place X versus place Y? That’s a decision somebody has to make. Why can’t I place everything in my data center, or in the public cloud, or in a branch location? There is a reason to pick-and-choose one of these things.”Just before the pandemic hit, Pandey explained to us that microservices (the small parts of distributed applications) are being spread thinner and thinner across networks. To the software developer as well as to the end user, the connections between them need to be invisible. The network or networks that bind them, should be transparent.Now Pandey takes this idea further, suggesting that edge architecture may be neither about the customer nor the service provider, but instead the application.For example, he cited an unnamed customer of Cisco’s Meraki cameras that happens to operate thousands of coffee houses worldwide.  This customer has designs to utilize these cameras for remote inventory maintenance, for ensuring mask wearing during the pandemic, and occasionally peeking in how well the baristas are serving their customers. Theoretically, it would be a single application with perhaps the most distributed edge deployment of any retail operation, anywhere on the globe.”All of these things have a direct revenue value on their business,” the engineering VP continued.  “Now, you cannot take this across hundreds of thousands of stores globally, and make it work in a public cloud model. It’s just not going to scale. By the time that insight comes back, the customer’s already gone.”While many in this business tout the need to keep things simpler for the software developer, arguably, a deployment model which separates the data gathering function of a real-time video analysis application, from the frame-by-frame analysis function, would be the simplest for a team of developers to devise. But from the standpoint of deployment and maintenance (the “-Ops” side of DevOps), all that back-and-forth would be difficult enough for a small retail chain, let alone a coffee colossus with 33,000 worldwide locations.What would make this even harder would be the requirement to share the same network with the telecommunications provider that owns it.For 5G MEC to work, customer applications would not only need to be concurrently orchestrated. They would be pressed to share space and time with telcos’ own 5G core components such as the Radio Access Network (RAN), along with all the other services that find themselves incorporated into the 5G Wireless portfolio. As of now, the questions of which services get divided into slices, as well as how that happens and who’s responsible, remain unresolved.One scenario mobile operators envision for 5G network slicing.
Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance
T-Mobile and others have suggested that network slices could divide classes of internal network functions — for instance, compartmentalizing eMBB from mMTC from URLLC. Others, such as the members of the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), suggest that slices could effectively partition networks in such a way (as suggested by the NGMN diagram above) that different classes of user equipment, utilizing their respective sets of radio access technologies (RAT), would perceive quite different infrastructure configurations, even though they’d be accessing resources from the same pools.

Another suggestion being made by some of the industry’s main customers, at 5G industry conferences, is that telcos offer the premium option of slicing their network by individual customer. This would give customers willing to invest heavily in edge computing services more direct access to the fiber optic fabric that supports the infrastructure, potentially giving a telco willing to provide such a service a competitive advantage over a colocation provider, even one with facilities adjacent to a “carrier hotel.””I believe it will become the norm,” remarked Verizon’s Sender, “that we will have micro-edge implementations; private, on-site implementations; MEC in the public network; regional, local capabilities, all across the compute environment, all supporting one use case for our customer. These things don’t really compete; they’re complementary.”There are diametrically split viewpoints on the subject of whether slicing could congregate telco functions and customer functions together on the same cloud. Some have suggested such a convergence is vitally necessary for 5G to fulfill the value proposition embodied in China Mobile’s original proposal for Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). Architects of the cloud platforms seeking to play a central role in telcos’ clouds, such as OpenStack and CORD, argue that this convergence is already happening — which was the whole point to begin with. AT&T has gone so far as to suggest the argument is moot and the discussion is actually closed: Both classes of functions have already been physically separated, not virtually sliced, in the 5G specifications, its engineers assert. It launched its own 5G MEC initiative in January 2019 statement, stating at the time, “The data that runs through AT&T MEC can be routed to their cloud or stay within an enterprise’s private environment to help increase security.” Yet AT&T may yet wish it had not attempted to close the issue so soon. 5G’s allowance for smaller towers that cost less and cover more limited areas is prompting ordinary enterprises to seek their respective governments’ permission to become their own telecommunications providers, with their own towers and base stations serving their own facilities.Divide and conquerIn March 2019, Germany’s Robert Bosch GmbH launched a partnership with Qualcomm, enabling the manufacturer to apply for and receive dedicated spectrum from German government authorities. Evidently aggravated with the pace of the network slicing argument, Bosch hard-wired its own 5G Wireless and 5G MEC services for its own factories. Auto maker Volkswagen followed suit the next month, apparently for the same reasons. These may represent the most extreme edge computing use cases, said Pandey. But they didn’t take back the power of their own communications systems from telcos, just to hand it over to a different class of tech giant.”They want all that decision-making to happen within that edge manufacturing location,” said Pandey.  “It depends on what the edge vertical is, but all of these things have the same bottom line: There is a volume of data, there is a cost of doing business on a volume of data, and there is a cost of shuffling that data across [from edge to cloud and back].”For years, the viability of network security policies depended upon hard compartmentalization. One network couldn’t be leveraged to break into another network, if there were no connections between them. Likewise, for applications that build their own virtual networks around themselves, one app can’t be leveraged to break into another app, if they don’t share the same namespace.In 2015, VMware turned this entire idea on its head, with a concept called microsegmentation. Rather than dividing networks into large segments, the policies that determined what data gets routed where could be written in such a way as to only recognize restricted sets of addresses for each application, as though all the other addresses didn’t exist. Imagine a satellite map of a city where all the unimportant houses and buildings disappeared, redacted from history, but you don’t notice it because you ignore unimportant things by design. You can’t break into something you don’t believe in.Since that time, this model has been expanded into newer, bolder security models such as the Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP). A network’s entire structure can be defined by policy alone: by a set of rules that, by restricting access only to what exists, implies that nothing else does.In this frame from his Clovisor demo, Stephen Wong shows how Clovisor running in the upper left node successfully injects network routes into three isolated nodes, starting with the upper right node.This is essentially how Clovisor works: by “injecting” rules directly into each pod’s map of the network, using a policy mechanism rather than some administrator-only override.For Huawei’s SOC vision to be viable, such a network map would need to be centralized within Istio’s Mixer component. Maybe, like Cisco’s Pandey projected, the central location for Mixer would be picked-and-chosen, but that would probably happen just once, and that choice would likely be a public cloud platform.And as Wong further explained, that would be a bad idea.”If all your [policy] requests have to go to the cloud just to get Mixer to say yes,” remarked Wong, “that’s the kind of delay that’s completely unacceptable.”It turned out this rule holds true across the board, for any application that makes use of a service mesh. By the end of last year, Mixer was officially deprecated as a part of Envoy. In its place is a mechanism that enables Clovisor to safely inject the ingress and egress points of the mesh, directly into pods. This way, each pod manages its own version of the active policy — not unlike the way DNS servers maintain local maps for resolving domain names to IP addresses.By decentralizing the control plane mechanisms, Clovisor could conceivably give Bosch, Volkswagen, and enterprises of their scale and caliber, exactly the tools they need to manage their communications systems and edge computing platforms, on their own terms. And that’s a problem, at least for the original, would-be vendors of 5G MEC services — the communications service providers that bought into China Mobile’s all-out cloud migration plan in the beginning.The solution to the network striping issue — if, indeed, that’s what this is — may borrow a page from microsegmentation. Instead of a hard subdivision made physically real by a toggled circuit breaker, Clovisor or something like it could create edge networks out of bits and pieces of pods, segmented and isolated on an as-needed basis.Yet here is how the outcome of this solution changes everything: MEC started out as a way for telcos to get into the cloud services business, opening up new revenue channels using commercial customers. Unable to break into a market dominated by AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and to a far lesser extent, “Other,” telcos settled for partnering with existing cloud service providers, offering customers commercial data services as part of their 5G contracts. But that business model is only viable if cloud functionality is the service being consumed by communications, and not vice versa.If 5G MEC ends up looking like a culmination of Clovisor, edge deployments could instead end up as premium options for existing commercial cloud service contracts. In other words, it wouldn’t be AT&T, Verizon, or T-Something that sends the bill to its phone-using customers, but instead AWS, Azure, and GCP inserting line-items into their SLAs. Economically speaking, telcos would find themselves tossed into the back seat. Sure, they’d have new revenue sources, but it wouldn’t be the same as drumming up excitement and enthusiasm for something else with the “5G” moniker. And perhaps the one thing that ends up going right for 5G these past several years, would see someone else soaking up all the credit.[Portions of this article are based on material that appeared in a previous edition of a ZDNet Executive Guide to 5G Wireless, which has since been revised.]LEARN MORE  More

TPG Telecom is set to join Telstra in offering 5G fixed-wireless services on an invite-only basis from next month. Speaking at the company’s AGM, CEO Inaki Berroeta said TPG has over half a million customers on its 5G network, with coverage available in over “500 suburbs in cities and major centres”. “Take-up of our fixed wireless services has been encouraging as we expand the service across more brands and channels,” he said. “Watching video is what customers do most on their devices — and our mobile network has been built for video.” By the end of 2021, TPG wants to have 85% population coverage for its 5G network within Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Canberra. “At the end of last year we renewed our tower arrangements with Axicom allowing us to upgrade our Axicom sites to 5G,” the CEO said. “It will also increase the speed of our 5G roll out with more than 400 Axicom sites to be upgraded with 5G equipment.” Berroeta added the company has integrated over 400 small cells into its mobile network, and was deploying fibre to mobile sites ahead of schedule.

With the merger between Vodafone Australia and TPG being implemented 10 months ago, the CEO said the new company was working to have “culture as a primary company asset”. “From a cultural integration point of view, and I am pleased at how well our people are working together to deliver our strategic priorities,” he said. “Together we are building a new culture at TPG Telecom. It will be a culture with customers at the heart and one which encompasses the best parts of the two businesses.” At the AGM, Jack Teoh was successful in being elected to the board, following his father and brother departing in March, and TPG announced its CFO Steve Banfield was leaving after more than 20 years with TPG. Related Coverage More

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The federal government has announced it is ploughing an additional AU$130 million into the “hugely popular” Regional Connectivity Program (RCP) ahead of handing down its budget on May 11. The funding is broken down into AU$106 million for a second round of the RCP, of which AU$45.6 million has been “quarantined” for Northern Australia, and almost AU$25 million for additional “shovel-ready” projects in round 1.

Australian Budget 2021

“The pandemic has shown many Australians the value of the regions, both as economic powerhouses and as desirable destinations to live, work, and raise a family,” Minister for Regional Communications Mark Coulton said. “In order to ensure regional Australians can continue to do the heavy lifting the nation asks of them, the government recognises — and is investing in — the need for improved connectivity.” Last month, the government announced it had selected 81 sites to carve up the AU$90 million available under the first round. Thanks to co-funding arrangements with recipients of the grants, state and local-level governments, regional businesses, and community organisations, the total spent will be in excess of AU$180 million. Many details on the successful projects are not released, however since then, Telstra and Western Australia have opened up on some of the projects.

Telstra said earlier this week it is set to be involved in 30 projects at a cost of AU$16 million from the telco, AU$13 million from state and local governments, and AU$26 million from the Commonwealth. One big ticket item is the AU$9.8 million project to provide a six-fold upgrade to King Island connectivity and set up a 110km radio link across Bass Strait back to Victoria. At the same time, Telstra announced it was opening a AU$200 million co-investment fund for regional mobile coverage to run over the next four years. The telco said it will be looking to partner with governments, local councils, and businesses to make regional projects viable. Meanwhile, Western Australia detailed the projects that will make up the AU$23 million of RCP improvements. The federal government is kicking in AU$17.1 million, while WA puts forward AU$5.88 million of funding. Among the projects are eight mobile coverage improvements from Telstra, two mobile coverage upgrades from Pivotel, three projects upgrading fixed wireless coverage, two improving satellite broadband connectivity, and one project in excess of AU$3 million to shift from satellite coverage to fibre to the premise in Halls Creek. Related Coverage More

Australian Budget 2021

The Australian government has said it will be handing over AU$16.4 million in mobile connectivity grants as part of its 2021 Budget set to be unveiled on May 11. The grants will be focused on bushfire-prone peri-urban areas, the outskirts and transition areas between urban and rural landscapes, and given the abbreviation PUMP for Peri-Urban Mobile Program. “Improving coverage on the peri-urban fringe will help communities access vital information during emergencies, seek help if needed and stay in touched with loved ones,” Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said. “PUMP will also improve the quality and reliability of available mobile services, providing benefits on a day-to-day basis for those living and working in these communities.” The grants will cover “new and improved” mobile connectivity, with Fletcher adding it will complement the Mobile Black Spot Program, which is now on round 5A. Fletcher also said the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would also get AU$4.2 million to “support the implementation and administration” of the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. “Our investment will enable ACMA to fulfil its functions under the Code, including administering an eligibility scheme, registering news businesses, and maintaining a register of arbitrators,” the minister said.

“We welcome the reports that Google and Facebook have reached commercial agreements with some news businesses for the use of their content, and encourage the parties to continue to negotiate deals in good faith. “This is powerful evidence the Code is already doing its job.” Related Coverage More