What differentiates Straitshot from competitors such as Masergy Communications or tier-one bandwidth pro-viders such as AT&T is Straitshot's ability to pump high bandwidth into small environments without cleaning out a customer's wallet, Rizzo said. With Straitshot, Adapt can set up a small office using an ADSL connection and guarantee at least 75 percent of the available bandwidth. This means, for example, a small office of five people can get guaranteed bandwidth sufficient for about nine VoIP calls, he said.
"An office of five people is not going to have nine VoIP calls going over the WAN, so they've got plenty of headroom, and a high SLA [service-level agreement], because Straitshot guarantees over 99 percent in-sequence packet delivery and latency of between 70 and 80 milliseconds, which for voice is good," he said.
Emergency failover is factored into Straitshot's low per-site price through the creative use of multicarrier redundancy, said Jeff Hautala, vice president of customer development and a co-founder of Straitshot.
"What we do is couple the Layer-2 ADSL connection with a fractional, lower-speed T1 about the same size, so the customer can use both those circuits, which are different types of technology on different equipment. So the service becomes very bulletproof as far as failover. If one goes down, all the calls go over to the other circuit," explained Hautala.
Jeffrey Lowe, a senior solution engineer at Black Box Network Services, Murfreesboro, Tenn., said reselling Straitshot is like having his own frame-relay cloud without the added cost of all the permanent virtual circuits (PVCs).
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
