Goliath, The Miracle on Ice, and Broadband… what can we learn?

The 2020 Olympic Games are finally upon us. And we have seen some wonderful surprises that made it worth the extra wait.

And yet, the biggest surprise of all that will be indelibly burned into my mind was at the 1980 Winter Olympics. I think of it every time one of my friends, who owns a small business, talks about his/her broadband.

You may be thinking … “Ah, what did you just say? You’re comparing the Olympics to broadband?” Get a hobby bro!”

Let me explain… As my uncle Frank always says, this game is the single most exciting sporting event evah! (yes, spoken proudly with a proud Boston accent)… the US hockey team, comprised of college players, beat a Soviet Union Red Army team, made up of seasoned professionals.

That victory, dubbed the “Miracle on Ice” was biblical, your basic David v Goliath. Only I am pretty sure the Red Army team got paid a lot more than Goliath. Although, I dare not think about their fate after losing.

I know, you may be asking how a hockey game relates to small business broadband.

Basically, in the world of business broadband, a typical broadband solution consists of access and dial tone. A small business shouldn’t need a miracle to access the advanced features and benefits that the big guys have. With today’s technology and the right partner, any small business can achieve the Goliath-like broadband services that were once unique to the likes of Cisco, Amazon, and Chase.

What makes up an enhanced broadband solution?

It starts with a pre-integrated offering to quickly and easily enable things like:

• Self-installation – Allowing subscribers to install and set-up their own equipment reduces operational expenses as well as giving customers a much more flexible onboarding experience.
• Self-care and Troubleshooting – Enabling subscribers to configure, manage and troubleshoot their own equipment to minimize calls, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
• Remote management and full-service support – Empowering customer service representatives, technicians and support teams to quickly identify and remediate subscriber issues.
• Subscriber Insights – Providing the ability to audit and run reports that give insights into service performance, how they are being utilized and to proactively address issues plaguing the field.

These components enable features such as zero-touch activation and subscriber self-care to facilitate self-installation, provisioning and management, all of which help to reduce operational expenses and improve the subscriber experience.

Additionally, the advanced key capabilities small to medium businesses should look for include:

• Advanced Wireless that allows a business to easily manage users, devices and private/guest networks. Guest networks keep network traffic segmented, ensure QoS, and apply appropriate agreement requirements for DMCA T&Cs
• Advanced Security to deliver control and insight into security threats on their devices and network to help protect their business, employees, and assets
• Business Continuity with switchover to LTE backup to provide support during network outages, and battery backup support to ensure telephony service can continue during power outages
• Advanced Routing, such as RIPv2, static IP address, SoftGRE tunnelling, firewall/filtering, MAC address blocking, white/black IP listing, and IP protection attacks
• QoS to ensure that the business applications that SMBs rely on, take priority over other network traffic when needed. QoS is not a fixed configuration, but it must adapt in failover scenarios while resuming operations when connectivity is reestablished.

Which begs the question: What good would all these features be if they were complicated to leverage?

And the answer? A simple mobile app especially geared towards SMB use cases such as business continuity and service health. One that allows subscribers to quickly manage and diagnose their business network, initiate several tasks like speed tests, and other troubleshooting actions.

Perhaps a bunch of amateur college kids beating a bunch of professionals is a bit of a stretch as an analogy to the state of small business broadband. Nevertheless, if the 1980 Olympics taught us something, it is that anything is possible.