The little network that could...

When I first arrived at Media Machines, they were renting cubes from a company called Coghead in Redwood City.  They had a wireless access point and that was connected into Coghead's network.  All basic, except for one important aspect - Network performance was so bad it was quite literally useless.  Coghead had a couple admins but they didn't know what to do and it was clear they weren't going to figure it out anytime soon.  So since Media Machines was about 8-10 people, I figured I would give my Junxion Box a shot. 

The Junxion Box had a EVDO Rev A card from Verizon.  Performance was great and people were really happy to have something that works.  Remember this is 8-10 people sharing at most a couple mbits and now being happy.

Media Machines grew and moved.  We couldn't get any type of Internet connection except wireless which is supposed to be turned up tomorrow.  As we grew I was asked to get 2 more Junxion Boxes so people could associate to a specific one and get some connectivity as the company was maxing out a single EVDO card.

I was working with Les, Ops Mgr, on a thought around "Why can't put all these together somehow to have one network that utilizes as man Junxion Boxes that we have?"

So with that in mind we did exactly that.  We dusted off the original Cisco wireless access point and made it a DHCP server and router.  We set the IP addresses of the Junxion Boxes and created a separate network for clients to use internally.  Then we made sure Cisco Express Forwarding and destination-based load balancing were enabled on the Cisco AP and simply set up 3 default routes to each of the Junxion Boxes.

It's not been 'great', but we have 25 people operating off this network and have been for weeks.  I still think it's pretty cool to have that many people off of what to most clients is a regular Internet connection.

We did have to switch from Verizon to Sprint however.  Verizon's "Unlimited" data plan is not unlimited at all.  They used to disconnect account but got into legal trouble, had to cough up a million bucks to those disconnected, etc.  They now define Unlimited as 5GB per month.  After 5GB they will not stop your card from working nor disconnect you, they will slow it down to the point of it being useless.  Go Verizon - @$%^@  Anyway, turns out that Sprint is truly Unlimited, so word to the wise.  Just a point of reference, as an individual, I have never come close to 5GB.  When I had the Junxion Box setup the very first day, the 8-10 people did 1GB in 4 hours.  And to add insult to injury, we have a corporate account with Verizon and they permit even less data transfer and charge more (tried to anyway) than consumer cards.

There's a whole other story about Verizon allowing anything that passes a test onto their network, which I think is very cool, but I would like to see Sprint put the hurt on Verizon to change some of it's policies.  If you can download 5GB in a day and have 4 hours left, seems like 5GB sucks.

Just a story for startups in a pinch or even for bigger companies who need a "In case of emergency break glass" setup.  Our Junxion Boxes aren't going anywhere, just our default routes.