Last week, our Phoenix employees gathered after work to attend the Phoenix Suns game, and also to socialize away from the office and enjoy some holiday festivities. What a great opportunity to socialize away from the office and enjoy some holiday festivities. The team has had a great early start to their season, and I am excited to cheer them on as a new Arizona resident. I’m also appreciative of what a great long-term customer the Phoenix Suns have been for Sparkplug.

This raises an important point. Events are hard to support in the “traditional” network world. They happen sporadically. Bandwidth usage is hard to predict, and tends to surge during the event, then disappear. Ordering a wired, high-capacity connection used to be the only alternative, which is expensive, and the lead times were lengthy.

All of which makes it tough for an event coordinator. You would have to start thinking months in advance about your network requirements, and order the line without being able to predict usage. Worst of all, you paid a premium to order a circuit that carried less than a one-year term.

At Sparkplug, we’ve been able to help customers solve these challenges. In March this year, we got a call from the “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” crew who needed high-capacity access to the Internet for just one week – and they gave us two days advance notice. You can read more about how we helped Extreme Home Makeover here.

In the fixed wireless world, this is pretty routine for us and we installed their radio link in three hours, which connected all of their trailers at the build site to the Internet so they could exchange building plans.

More recently, in October, we supported the Barrett Jackson Auto Show in Las Vegas with the same type of temporary, high-speed connection for just the one week that show was on:
http://www.sparkplug.net/about-broadband/news/press-releases/barrett-jackson

They used it to upload videos of the auctions as part of their Quality Assurance process. And now we’re gearing up for the Barrett Jackson show in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January, doing pretty much the same thing.

While events are not our mainstream business, they highlight the advantages of wireless that regular business can also take advantage of:

fast install
high capacity links
easily scaled as usage spikes
reliability equivalent to any wireline service

And I’m happy to report that the Suns won!