When it comes to internet service, paying a lot for a high-speed connection does not necessarily mean your computers will be communicating with the rest of the world at the highest speeds, according to Brian Higgins, CEO of Norwalk-based Aditum Internet Management Service. Aditum is a Latin word, generally translated into English as “access.”
“People think what you need is lots of speed, and that”™s pretty patently false,” Higgins told the Business Journal. “What you need is low latency and consistency. The lower the latency, the faster the round trip time it takes for packets of electronic data to go out and back.”
Higgins said that if a computer sends a request out to Google, Yahoo, CNN, or a company”™s server when someone is working from home, the latency on that request to go out to the other side of the connection and get a response back averages for a fiber circuit somewhere between 5and 15 milliseconds (thousandths of a second). A single web page may require tens, hundreds or thousands of packets of data in order for all of its content to be displayed depending on the content.
“On a cable modem, that latency is more like 40 to 50 milliseconds,” Higgins said. “What that means, do the simple math, is your computer can make a request on that fiber circuit and already be midway through making an exchange of data back and forth multiple times by the time it”™s even gotten the first response back over a cable modem.”
Higgins said that with today”™s technology, the latency can have a bigger impact on how fast it feels to users that computers are running than whether they”™ve bought 50 megabit per second service, 100 megabit per second service or something even faster and more expensive.
Overall speed and cost efficiency is only part of what Higgins highlights in the internet installations Aditum offers for commercial office buildings, residential buildings, strip malls and other properties.
The company works with local resellers to provide landlords, property managers, co-op boards and others with turnkey internet service packages into a building that those responsible for the property can use to sell individual service to the end-users. The local resellers do the actual installation of the equipment and software that”™s been provided by Aditum that hooks up to an incoming internet line and then connects with individual subscribers in the building.
Aditum does not deal directly with the end-users. Rather, the landlords, managers or other entities that control a building offer the internet service to their own tenants.
Higgins said that Aditum”™s business model allows the landlords to offer internet service to their tenants at prices below what”™s currently available in the marketplace if they wish and at the same time achieve profits for themselves that typically range from $10 to $30 a month per unit for a large residential building.
Higgins said that Aditum has systems deployed coast to coast. “There”™s something along the lines of 30,000,000 rental units in America on the residential side. We”™d like to see every one of those units on multifamily properties being served internet through our systems hopefully, eventually,” he said.
“As far as current reach, we have resellers in over half the states in the country. I think we”™re up to 26 or 28 states that we have registered resellers in and we have deployments from New York City all the way out to Los Angeles and we”™ve had successful testing up in Alaska.”
Higgins said that the installations are split approximately 50/50 between residential and commercial.
He said that because the system is designed to require very little technical knowledge to install, if a building owner has an information technology person they”™re working with for their existing IT needs, including an alarm company that”™s doing door access control or security cameras, that vendor can become an Aditum reseller.
Higgins himself has been interested in computer technology since he was a child playing games on some of the earliest computers. By the time he was a teenager, he had become somewhat of a computer engineer and was being called upon by a manufacturing firm in Indiana to handle problems with its computers.
The die was cast and he attended Ivy Tech Community College and Purdue University. He was a founder of Accent Consulting Services and ForePoint Networks, an internet service provider in Indiana. After ForePoint was sold, Higgins moved to Connecticut, where Aditum was founded. In 2019, Higgins was honored with a 40 Under Forty Award from Westfair Communications.
“You have a building that”™s owned by corporation XYZ and they want to provide internet service for the tenants. You”™d have a reseller. That reseller goes in and assesses the wiring in the building and says, ”˜OK, your wiring is up to par,”™ or ”˜We need to make a few changes here and there.”™ They go then to oversee or do the wiring for the building, whatever pieces are left, and then put our head-end equipment in and connect it to a fiber circuit or any bulk internet connection. The reseller can provide a tenant with a zero-touch router, a self-programing, self-configuring device and they can just plug it in or the tenant can provide their own router,” Higgins said.
Higgins noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has really focused attention on the critical nature of having internet connections that truly do operate quickly.
“We”™ve seen an uptick in tenant demand. We are getting calls from tenants directly asking if we can bypass their building owner and cable company and just provide them service directly. They”™re trying to go out and find solutions themselves because they don”™t have enough choice,” Higgins said.
Higgins said that he”™d like building owners to be aware that they have internet cables “going through the wall to another company that money is flowing out of and into someone else”™s pocket. You have the ability as a landlord to provide a higher quality service at a better price and get paid.”
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