Jokers Engineering

Who here likes buffering, delays, or just plain connections dropping while trying to surf your favorite website or video/music streaming service?  Nobody does.....  Unfortunately much of Florida's rural households still have limited access to quality, affordable, or fast internet service due to living in rural, lower density areas.  Most of the "major" providers refuse to move into these areas due to the cost to setup a full network with their methods of delivery.  Even in areas of high population, it is common to only have 1 or 2 options.  

Broadband has traditionally been provided to a household using TV cable providers using their existing networks, commonly referred to as “Cable Internet”. In recent years, fiber optic cables have become available for home installs but come at a high cost to providers. In densely populated areas, this is less of an issue due to an expected return on investment. The main issues with both of these services are they are limited to their fixed wired areas and are often your only choice in a single area of its class. Also, for those of us who have been with these major carriers for many years, their customer service is often less than desired.

For those of us living outside of the major cities, these types of providers have less of a market share, and/or offer slower and more expensive internet services. This can add to the cost of their service to the client as well as not providing the same speeds as other conventional methods.

The next common type of service for rural areas is satellite. These providers use geostationary satellites and a dish at the customer’s place of service.  Satellite has some major downsides such as price and lower speeds.  Service is often affected by even minor weather or clouds, and often comes with a “data cap” for each month, limiting the amount you can download/browse.  

The problem? A lack of quality choices in rural areas offering non-capped data at higher speeds that customers have grown to expect. With today’s service-based society, there is a great opportunity for a customer service focused company to enter a limited competition industry with an exciting new generation of technology and thinking.

The Solution

Instead of expensive fiber or copper connections to each customer, we will be providing internet services using an advanced encrypted wireless network based on distribution towers and neighborhood boosters similar in appearance to traditional cell carrier antennas, without the data caps, throttling, and contracts. Wireless broadband technology for data has been in use for many years but has seen a major boost thanks to recent developments in speed, features, and reliability in recent years, opening opportunities to provide service that equals or exceeds traditional providers' methods.

This eliminates the need to run expensive fiber to each serviced location significantly, reducing overall costs.

Each serviced location will have an access device approximately the size of a small satellite TV receiver or one as small as a handheld device installed on the exterior of their building/home which will connect to the closest tower using leading security encryption to their location.

How We Do It

The core of the network starts at a main datacenter and houses our core servers, routers, switches, and backhaul fiber connection from a national provider. For Phase 1, the datacenter will be located in a co-located facility run by a preferred vendor. This is common practice with companies needing reliable datacenter space without having to spend the large amounts of capital building space with the required cooling, electrical feeds, and battery/generator backups. Our market also has the potential for extreme weather and needs to be housed in a building rated for these types of events.

Our physical network starts with a core of Cisco switches and will be housed in our main datacenter. These switches will be configured to act as a single connection point for all towers and access points to connect back to. This is also where our main connection to the internet will reside. As the network grows, so will the size and number of core network switches, servers, and tier 1 internet connections. Our initial planned and quoted connection is capable of handling approximately 300 clients which allows to become cash flow positive while keeping a leaner budget.   As our demand grows, more connections are easily added by inhouse network professionals with little to no downtime to our clients.

There will be an array of backhaul radios located on the roof of the datacenter building linking to our Phase 1 main distribution tower(s). The main datacenter has a preselected location to reside in a 450 ft tall building in downtown Tampa, Florida. The root distribution tower is in its final selection phase and all outstanding quotes are being considered. Several potential towers are located south of Brandon, Florida and are part of a group of 1,500 ft broadcast towers. We are also considering building a self managed/owned tower in the same region.  

The distribution tower will act as both a service antenna for the immediate area providing direct client access as well as being the root tower that other towers, repeaters, and access points connect to. As the network grows, more distribution towers will be added that connect back to the datacenter, providing increased redundancy to ensure service uptime.

Example Network Setup

Planned additional services:

VOIP Phone Services including hosted/managed VOIP services

Traffic Camera connections 

Remote CCTV connections 

Area drone data for delivery services

Business services including onsite network setup and management

VPN and network security

Arrowlink CARES

Planned Network and Business Timeline/Steps

Upon completion of funding round 1, we will complete the initial server/switch/router setup in our contracted datacenter space and the initial distribution tower will be setup in the area that will best serve our first targeted service area.  Marketing will begin including direct mailers mailed to the first protentional clients. 

Network tower boosters and distribution towers will continue to be setup and built until we reach our base market share.

As we continue to build this network, the planned additional services will be added as business demands and funds become available.  Follow up raises will be held as needed to push us to the next major step.

Thank you to all of our supporters and lets work together toward bringing the internet service that this local $250+ million market deserves.  We encourage anyone with questions to please post them here and we will be happy to keep everyone informed.