BaldwinTel

New FCC Smartphone Database Cuts Thefts in Six Months But We help You Today

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

 The FCC is announcing that they have decided to partner with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, t-mobile and other wireless carriers to create a national database to help thwart the theft of smartphones by making them all but unsellable after a theft.

Uh ... that's good, right?  

Sure it is when the newest smartphones cost upwards of $500 or more. 

But the real cost of smartphone loss is the loss of the data ... and the person stealing your phone may be only after the data ... and the new FCC smartphone database won't do anything to prevent a thief from stealing your phone if all they want is to steal your data.

 

Don't Wait for the Feds!  Here's How to Secure Your Phone Right Now...

1. Put a password on your phone.

Sure it's a hassle to type in the name of your Aunt's dog into your phone several times a day.  But how much more trouble would it be for your friends, relatives, enemies, competitors or the government to be able to access everything on your phone from the moment they "find" it until the moment you realize it's gone?

2. Make sure whatever's on your phone is already in the cloud.

Remember this Google+ commercial from awhile back about the dad who lost all his baby pictures because he lost his cell phone? Your phone (and your desktop computer for that matter) is not meant to be a secure storage device. It's meant to be a simple endpoint to collect data and then get it instantly to a safer place.

3. Use software that "finds your phone or fries your phone"

For as little as three bucks or as much as twenty bucks you can access any number of smartphone applications that can do as little as find a lost phone in vibrate mode, turn a phone into a coldwar-type spy device and/or turn your phone into a useless plastic brick.  GadgetTrak, SeekDroid and Webroot are just three of multiple companies that specialize in giving you control over lost phones.

Solution Review: How Distributed Enterprise IT Directors Solve 3G/4G Fixed Wireless Connectivity Problems

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

 What's an IT director for a quick service restaurant ("QSR") or similar distributed enterprise company in Southern California or beyond to do when the wide area network ("WAN") solution he or she wants to implement using a low cost DSL landline solution can only reach 80% of the companies locations?

Throw a 3G cellular AirCard in a wireless router, right?  Wrong.

An aircard in a router is probably the best solution if the business location is actually a recreational vehicle - contantly on the move. AirCards are great for mobile wireless data needs be far from perfect in a fixed office environment.  So how does an IT director solve the 3G/4G connectivity problems when trying to implement a fixed wireless solution?

Call on Accel Networks, the wireless data company that "tunes in" your wireless data signals with their unique proprietary antennae like no other wireless or landline company can.

If you've tried fixed wireless using AirCards for your data network locations unreachable by DSL and couldn't solve the connectivity problem, don't give up without calling your authorized Accel Networks solution partner.

 

How and Why is Accel Networks Solution Better than Everyone Else?

How does Accel do it better than all their competitors including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint?

Listen to Jonathan Forest, VP of Accel networks explain it himself in the following short recorded interview.

 

Listen to Recording:  Click Here to Download MP3

 

 

Read Transcript:   Click Here to Download PDF

How Quick Service Restaurant & Other Distributed Enterprise IT Directors Solve 3G/4G Fixed Wireless Connectivity Problems:

Accel Network's New Cellular Broadband Antenna

February 2012A Business Phone News conversation with Jonathan Forest, Vice President of Accel Networks, about how their new Maestro cellular broadband antenna system is gaining traction with CIOs and IT directors of many quick service restaurant chains and other similar multi-location retail businesses.

 

  DB:  So let's get right to the problems that QSR (“quick service restaurant”) IT directors have. They want to power the broadband needs of their retail stores with affordable 3G or 4G fixed wireless, but they're getting killed by connectivity problems.   

Question #1.   Please describe the nature and prevalence of the connectivity problems.

  JF:   Yes.   Specifically we see in our market that broadband is certainly the desire of many of the QSR and retail customer since it's a lower cost option, and it really fits their needs; however, broadband, DSL and cable isn't really prevalent in all locations, and we see consistently approximately 10% to 20% of the market not being covered for these customers, and that's where we fit in. 

Accel provides a high-grade, premium wireless solution that provides broadband type of service at these 10% to 20% locations, and that's with 3G.

With 4G coming out, and we're launching that next month, 4G speeds will, in many ways, surpass DSL.   So, the 4G solution that customers will be experiencing will be right on par, or superior to what they are experiencing, and we fully expect the wireless services to continue expanding.

 

  DB:  Question #2.    Can you describe how does Accel's proprietary fixed wireless Maestro antenna address the problem? 

  JF:     Yes.   I would be glad to.  If you had to boil it down, Accel provides the cleanest wireless signal.  What does that mean?  What it really means is that we're trying to minimize the carrier noise, and optimize the signal.  The result is better performance.    

2:11  Accel comes from this perspective, the wireless perspective.    We do not come at this from a landline perspective.   This is crucial, and the reason is that in landline technologies, the transport, DSL, cable, T1, it's a commodity.  No matter whether provider A or provider B is offering the solution, the same result is going to happen.   DSL, the same distance from the CO (phone company “central office”), it's all the same, and with wireless it couldn't be any different. 

Should You Backup Your Critical Business Data in "the Cloud"? Can you afford a cheap solution?

By Dan Baldwin

As a telecom consultant and "VAR" (value added reseller), I'm always on the lookout for new technology solutions I can offer my business customers.

By examining everything that comes along, I'm also in a position to consult with my customers when they get an offer from someone else that seems way too good to be true -- like what appears to be an almost unlimited amount of cloud backup storage for next to nothing.

 

Who Does the Backup & How It's Tested is More Important than Price

I recently ran across an interesting opportunity to resell "unlimited" cloud backup storage to my business customers for just $59 per month.  Now this seems like a pretty killer deal at face value.  For just $59 per month I could give all my telecom consulting business clients "free data backup".

Or could I?

Hardrives "in the cloud" must be pretty cheap. I know this because big companies like Google sell me an extra 20 Gigs of storage a year for my Google Apps email storage for just $5 per year.

I'm pretty happy having 6 years and 60,000 old emails stored with Google because Google's a pretty big company and I'm fairly confident they know how to build and manage a data server farm. (And on top of that, backing up one user's email is fairly simple.)

But what about backing up "all the data" for "all your users"?

The biggest expense in cloud backup is not the cost of the actual hardrive sitting in a cloud somewhere.  The biggest expense is making sure a human that knows what they're doing is backing up your critical business data properly (and not overwriting good backups with bad backups) so that when you need to restore your data, your backup data set is not corrupted. 

 

So Who Are You Going to Trust?

While it appears that I can do it for you for practically free as we learned above, I'm thinking that

Will "Desktop-as-a-Service" or the "Virtual Desktop" Eliminate Your Need to Ever Buy Another Server?

By Dan Baldwin

For over the past twenty years I've been a business consultant helping my Southern California based multi-location business clients with their telecom decisions. For the majority of these two decades that's meant choosing the best business phone system or the right local phone service provider.  For the past decade I've focused on helping my clients choose the right wide area data networks (WANs) like MPLS or metro Ethernet to connect multiple office locations across the country.

Now that many of my clients have robust data networks in place they are discovering that they no longer need to keep all their computer network servers in their own office spaces - often the most dangerous place for them to be.

With ample bandwidth and network security in place, many of my clients are looking to place their application critical servers in a public or private colocation or data center facility that better protects the servers from a multitude of dangers.

Still other clients are looking to entirely eliminate their need to even own servers. For them, computing is seen as a utility much in the same way as their electric lights or dial-tone.  They don't need to own a phone company to make a phone call, nor do they need to own a power plant to illuminate their office. So many are now asking, "Why am I owning and maintaining all these servers when all I want to do is 'compute'"?

They wonder, "My business CRM runs on Salesforce but I don't own the computers that Salesforce runs on. I trust my online banking partners without having to own the bank's computers. Are my other applications so different?"

While pushing ANY business application to the cloud once seemed far-fetched, now many businesses are asking "So which of my applications CAN NOT go to the cloud"?

Verizon's "Premium Technical Support" Service Solves Computer Problems for Your "Work at Home" Employees

By Dan Baldwin,

As more and more businesses allow their employees to "work at home" out of necessity or convenience, more and more businesses are discovering the pain and expense of providing their remote workers with decent computer "help-desk" support.

In order to keep their FiOS residential customers from switching to their cable Internet competitors, Verizon is offering their "Premium Technical Support" service to any FiOS residential customer that needs "help desk" computer PC support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 

Unlimited PC & Mac "Help Desk" Support 24/7 for Under $15 per Month

This is an absolute screaming deal for any business with a "work at home" employee that they need to provide PC help desk support for. I actually signed up for this service myself and can personally vouch for how well it works.

While there might be many other things to hate about Verizon, there's really nothing but "good" about their "Premium Technical Support" service. Whenever I've got a computer problem I call 866-785-8145 and a human answers the phone.  They confirm I'm a customer, assign a trouble ticket and then pass me onto a technician.

The technician asks a couple questions and then gets me to allow him or her to log into my computer at http://expert.verizon.com/. A couple minutes later the technician to "fixing my computer" via remote log-in while I'm reading a magazine.

 

Supporting Your Existing Business IT Support Staff

I would not recommend that any business fire their existing IT support people or contractors after signing up for Verizon's premium technical support service, but it certainly makes economic sense to have the subscription as a "call these people first with your home computer problems" option to free up your existing IT support staff to work on bigger challenges of your computers at your office.

When I received my "welcome" email to the service the following items were confirmed to be included: