You won’t believe this! FORETHOUGHT.net is now offering 30M/30M fiber broadband, 8 phone lines, 1 POTS Line, free Colorado-wide calling and 2000 minutes long distance for only $500 a month to over 200 locations. 100M is also available! Use this link to find over 200 locations for Fiber Broadband and give your clients 30Mbps Up and down for only $500 a month! http://forethought.net/business/on-net-lit-building-map/ FORETHOUGHT.net Fiber BroadbandOffer your cllients what they have been asking for — Fiber. We can provide fiber access directly to the office. Offer subject to availibility. Starting at only $500 a month, the FORETHOUGHT.net Fiber Broadband package offers: 30 Mbps Up and Down 8 Digital Phone Lines 1 Analog Land Line Free Colorado-wide Calls 2000 Minutes Long Distance With FORETHOUGHT.net you get: Accessible, reliable, secure services No Installation Fee No tricky price increases after contract expires. No hidden charges and No Federal Access Charge! A la cart… read more →
The technology-driven economy of today depends on IT agility. Unfortunately, traditional IT infrastructures are too rigid, complex, and costly to keep up with rapidly changing market needs. The vast majority of an organizations IT budget is spent simply keeping the existing services running. This leaves very little time and resources for innovations. However, there is a better way through the use of cloud computing and server virtualization. FORETHOUGHT.net is taking the lead in cloud computing (AKA Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS). Having spent the last seventeen years perfecting the delivery of IT services to customers throughout the Colorado front range including Denver and Boulder metro areas, we have expanded our offerings to now include IaaS. When your organization needs to roll out a new product or service quickly, temporarily, or simply in a test environment, you need to think about computing differently. Rather than spending the time and resources… read more →
Today’s marketplace exists mainly in cyber-space. More and more businesses are moving away form brick and mortar business models and transitioning to the cloud for greater security and cost benefits. At FORETHOUGHT.net, we developed a white paper that can assist your company in understanding the cloud and how it can impact your business. Cloud 101 We begin by explaining what exactly cloud computing is, and is not. From there, the white paper moves into the various business trends that are driving the development of cloud services. Then we highlight some of the benefits delivered by cloud computing. Lastly, this section discusses the various service models available through cloud computing. These include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). You can find definitions and detailed explanations of each of these services, and others, listed in the white paper. Security One of the… read more →
DHCP-based address assignment are available to our MACH DSL residential and business customers – as well as new customers in our VDSL Fiber Broadband buildings. What does this mean exactly? Previously, we assign addresses for Internet service via PPPoE. PPPoE works well for this and is very flexible, but has a downside – it encapsulates all your packets inside PPP headers. This causes the following problems: 1) Additional overhead, using some of your link speed for PPP and not for your transmissions 2) The PPP overhead causes packets to have a smaller maximum MTU – which can cause problems with some VPN software and some firewalls. 3) Packets received must have the PPP “wrapper” removed. This is done with CPU-based Cisco routers that add additional latency. These routers can also run out of horsepower long before the link is full. Benefits of DHCP-based assignments By contrast, DHCP-based assignment… read more →
As FORETHOUGHT.net moves to deploy unparalleled fiber-based services throughout the Denver Metro area, we have begun to realize that the limiting factor in Internet performance is no longer the last mile connection. I speak of the Firewall. Most SMB Firewalls are woefully inadequate to the task of managing fiber speed traffic streams. Almost all the current crop of firewalls were built for 10Mbps and under – bonded T1s, or EoC. Putting these firewalls under test at 100 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps speeds showed them to be a serious bottleneck. For residential service you can rely on software firewalls on the PC, such as Norton. But for business applications, that’s a non-starter. We are evaluating a number of different next-generation firewalls, and our criteria are: Handle speeds up to 1000 Mbps IPv6 Support Reliable even under heavy load and 1000’s of simultaneous connections We are also starting to think that… read more →
The world just got a little smaller. Effective May 1, 2012, all calls by FORETHOUGHT.net telephone customers to destinations within the state of Colorado will be treated as local calls. No more long distance charges to call from Denver to Grand Junction, or from Boulder to Colorado Springs. In-state calling is unlimited, flat-rate, and included in the flat monthly phone line charges you already pay. Calling across the state is now the same as calling across town – no muss, no fuss, and no extra charges. This change is part of our broader strategy to erase the artificial LATA boundaries that were written into the telecom industry by the Bell breakup and the Telecom Act of 1996. There really is no reason to maintain these artificial distinctions – and the marketplace and shifting demographics have rendered the 30+ year-old LATA boundaries ludicrous. We are leveraging VoIP least cost routing to… read more →
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) is making hay about internet legislation HR 1981 – a bill that adds a money laundering crime to the books. They are claiming that this bill “Orders Internet Companies to Spy On You.” https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=497 Well I don’t know who is running the EFF these days, but this is bunk. This is the relevant clause from the proposed legislation (which the EFF does not bother to link to). `(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).’. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1981: I’ve run an ISP for 16 years and so have some insight as to what this means. As you may know,… read more →
Term contracts are a part of the telecom landscape. There’s no way to avoid them, really – it’s very capital-intensive to install and turn up new telecommunications services, so companies like FORETHOUGHT.net require a minimum term in order to make sure we can get that investment back, and make a profit. When our contracts expire, they go month-to-month. But there are still telecom companies out there that have contract clauses that automatically renew your service agreement for a year or even for the original term, possibly up to three years, unless you cancel within a narrow time window. These clauses are known as “auto-renewal” clauses, though I’ve heard of them as “greenfield” clauses too. These terms are purely for the carrier’s benefit, and what they do is put incredible time pressure on you, the customer, to quickly make a decision. Many of these auto-renew clauses only give you a 30-day… read more →
What some regular folks have to say about Comcast.. note the hostility towards Comcast’s rate-limiting, bandwidth limits, and customer service. http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/caption-contest-its-deadbeat-tastic/
Internet spam email is a big problem, there is no denying. There are many approaches to identifying and blocking spam, and none of them are foolproof. But there is also a clear difference between techniques – some are less reliable than others. Much less. An outfit known as SORBS (www.sorbs.net) provides some useful spam-filtering services, some of which we use. They maintain several lists, but the most useful one is a list of “dynamic IP addresses”. Generally users on these IPs should be using their ISP’s email server. This is reasonable, and there are easy ways around it in cases where it’s a problem. But SORBS also maintains a list of “known spam sources”. We do not use this one, because in our experience this list results in many false positives. Indeed – we now find ourselves on this SORBS blacklist, all over a total of three (3!!) emails received… read more →
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