Student Housing Business is the voice of the student housing industry.
Issue link: https://studenthousingbusiness.epubxp.com/i/616872
CONNECTIVITY NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 STUDENT HOUSING BUSINESS .COM 46 infrastructure within the building to ensure we are never held hostage by a provider." Baloga says that Airwave works with each owner and manager to develop a capital plan that is aimed at anticipating and properly budgeting for upgrades that may be on the horizon. "This prevents our property partners from exor- bitant capital spending at the time of development or takeover," he says, "and allows for timely, and economically sensible, investment throughout the lifetime of the own- er's interest in the community." Denial of Service Despite nearly 20 years of popu- lar Internet usage, outages do still occur as the result of inclement weather, network overloading and other unforeseen factors. Whatever the cause, student housing opera- tors and networking providers must be ready to assess and correct these situations. The satisfaction of residents depends on it. "If you have all the bells and whistles but your residents can't watch their favorite shows on Net- fix or view their online lecture for class, then nothing else you've promised matters," says Harden of The Colliers Cos. According to Pavlov Media CEO Mark Scifres, Pavlov uses redun- dancy on its backbone network and redundant links between its systems. "We leverage our nation- al backbone to provide a web of high-speed Internet links criss- crossing the entire nation. We pay close attention to environmental stability, power and grounding, because poor power delivery and cabling cause many outages." Sci- fres adds: "Fiber-to-the-user units improve reliability as they are resis- tant to factors that plague tradi- tional Ethernet, telecom and cable technologies." Dave Schweizer, vice president of student housing technologies for Hotwire Communications, says, "Our network operations center (NOC) and customer service cen- ters are manned around the clock from multiple geographic locations and actively monitor all of our sites to prevent disruptions and outages. Should an outage occur, the NOC is notifed in real-time and Tier 2 teams begin remote troubleshoot- ing. At this point, feld technicians are deployed immediately to the affected site and our account man- agers begin escalating communica- tion with property management." Having spare equipment can mitigate many disruptions, as can using a vendor with local support to help you respond faster, says Pye, not to mention communicating clearly with a landscaper as to the location of the underground fber. For many providers, taking a pro- active approach to potential outag- es is best. "Proper monitoring can provide an indication of equipment failure, improperly provisioned resources, or new and unidentifed DAVE DAUGHERTY Founder and CEO, Korcett DAVE SCHWEIZER, VP of Student Housing Technologies, Hotwire Communications