My wife Kay and I went on a road trip to southeast Oklahoma this weekend to enjoy the beautiful fall foliage along the Talimena Drive. Like most of our trips, we prefer to take the backroads rather than the highways when we can. Because of time constraints, we kept mainly to paved roads this trip, although we did catch a few miles of dirt roads here and there.
Along the way, we wandered into several small towns with names like Konowa, Hartshorne, Maud, and Wilberton. Small rural towns where – as my network engineer will often say – Internet is delivered on barbed wire. He jests of course, but the point is that high-speed network connectivity is hard to come buy in much of southeast Oklahoma.
But that doesn’t keep businesses from popping up to service clients. We consistently ran across retailers such as Dollar General Stores, Casey’s General Stores and Advance Auto Parts, and even the US Post Office, who were providing critical services to these often underserved communities. What do these clients all have in common?
SageNet.
Not just in Oklahoma. SageNet helps clients such as Dollar General service these out-of-the-way places using a variety of technology such as our satellite service, our cellular or MPLS circuits, or even DSL service. Most of these retailers will have two network connections from SageNet – one for primary and one for backup. SageNet will monitor the connections to ensure they are operational and provide our 24/7 NOC service to help in case of trouble.
As Kay and I drove through these small towns I would regularly look for and point out a satellite dish on the roof. “Would you quit?” she eventually admonished me. “It seems every new retailer has SageNet!”
Well, not all of them. But retailers and companies that need high-speed, reliable internet connections to remote locations across the United States sure have a lot of our services! SageNet manages over 220,000 connections across the country. And that is a lot of circuits if you ask me!
