Last June, we launched the Mapcom Systems Blog. Since last June we’ve published over 100 posts on various topics, industry news, and events. We have had over 11,000 pageviews coming from our blog. The visits to the blog have averaged approximately 4 and a half minutes. Some of our most popular blogs have been around the launch of the new website, reaching the millennial market, OTT services, and FCC reporting.
As we enter our second year of the blog we will have guest posts from our clients, posts from subject matter experts at Mapcom, and more to look forward to.
Here are some of the highlights from the past year:
The DAS Market Opportunity
Mobile device users rarely leave their homes without their smartphones or tablets. Consumers have come to expect dependable, steady and robust cellular and data connectivity no matter where they are. However, most of us have experienced the frustration of losing a signal inside a building and being cut off from friends, family and work communications at critical times. Wireless signals don’t always permeate the buildings they’re intended to service. Now, government agencies, enterprises, and community institutions are looking to solve this problem with distributed antenna systems (DASs).
How G-PON Technology Will Change the Future
With the recent USF Order from the FCC, one of the key takeaways was a discussion between the FCC and engineering firms that are designing Fiber to the home networks. The position of the engineering firms was that the FTTH networks they are designing were more expensive than the funding provided by the Alternative Connect America Model (A-CAM). The engineering firms had designed Gigabit-Passive Optical Networks (G-PON) with centralized splitters. The FCC stated that A-CAM assumes a G-PON with splitters in the field. Therefore the FCC says that the costs for that type of network are much lower than one with centralized splitters. A G-PON with splitters in the field would meet the speed requirements of the USF order of 10 Mbits/s down and 1 Mbits/s up and even the next tier of speed being discussed of 25 Mbits/s downstream and 3 Mbits/s upstream. It seems that this assumption will be driving much of the design considerations service providers make and the future of research to support continued passive optical networks.
M4 Spotlight: Project Backups
It’s a fact of life… nobody wants to think about a disaster happening. The thought of losing your entire project, including everything you’ve worked on in the past months or even years, is very scary. Mother Nature has been a fickle friend these past few weeks—we may be past the snow, but we’re now contending with wildfires, flooding in the southwest, tornados in the Midwest, and a hurricane season that has yet to begin. All of these can spell bad news for your project, but there are ways to protect all that hard work so you won’t have to spend one second of your summer vacation worrying whether or not your project is safe.
Turn Your Cybersecurity Expertise into Dollars
Communications providers are ahead of their communities in addressing these risks, especially as they look at techniques like the NIST cybersecurity framework. When we look at the NIST cybersecurity framework we see a methodology with a number of components for tackling a complex problem. The framework is a progressive approach to learning about cybersecurity risk. Then it guides the creation and adoption of mitigation strategies. As a result, organizational alignment and collaboration emerges around cybersecurity.
OTT Services: No Match for Rural CSPs
There has been a lot of talk recently about the cable cutting crisis: more and more cable subscribers are opting to eliminate service in favor of over-the-top (OTT) streaming options such as Netflix and Amazon Video. But according to new data, rural communications service providers (CSPs) are actually maintaining their cable subscribers. Why are these communities immune to the OTT trend? Let’s take a look.