Residential Fiber
Residential fiber installations have slowed due to COVID-19. Staff has been instructed to only perform repairs if needed. Installation’s have slowed naturally, but service requirements have increased due to working from home and stay-at-home ordinances. Traffic has not increased during peak hours, but has increase substantially during the work day. We are seeing an increase of many services. Gaming sources, Video streaming and VPNs/work protocols.
We are preparing for an increase in traffic, which may require an action that we call stack splitting. We are currently releasing updates to our software to accommodate the changes before we have to perform these changes.
Business Fiber
Business installs continue to crawl in. We have seen a slight increase in installations during the past month, as business gear towards take out and online systems. Others are switching, requesting an installation due to decreased performance from other providers.
Conversion of WiFi to fiber has begun near Champion and Industrial Way, as fiber is now extended to most buildings. As businesses have time, or close, we have used it an opportunity to transition them to fiber.
New Developments
Installations in Sandy Woods continues to progress. Of the available houses, most, if not all have taken service.
An upcoming apartment complex has reached out to SandyNet to explore a potential wholesale agreement. We are currently designing and calculating the cost to implement it.
Administration
Billing audits for every service charge has been discovering discrepancies, and have recovered previously lost revenue. We are continuing to run these audits monthly or bi-monthly to close the gap as we design a new workflow to prevent the process in the future.
SandyNet has installed new flow monitoring software to help track where traffic is going within our network. It has already proven very valuable during recent weeks. Future prospects may include identification of DDOS and malware attacks by linking destination streams up with known blacklisted addresses.
Work from home options are available to nonessential staff, and essential staff is still preparing to work from home in the near future.
SandyNet revenue has slowly been exceeding predictions, which is great news for helping balance the unrealized expenses this biennium.
Internal IT
We have been gearing up to deploy VPN’s and work from home measures during recent weeks. We have been working to tighten up security and decrease phishing within the city as well. One major milestone was taking control of our root domain again from our current website provider. Since then, we have incorporated a DKIM and SPF records to verify emails and prevent spoofing. Video conferencing software has been tested and implemented to allow telecommuting employees and council members to meet. Secure remote desktop solutions have been implemented for non mobile users that are working remotely.