Medicine Park Telephone Company
Worried about the effect of limited bandwidth to its thousands of customers, an ISP based in remote Oklahoma, was out of options to improve its services. That’s when Network/Systems Administrator of Medicine Park Telephone Company, Eli Vaughan, searched for possible solutions online and found that CACHEBOX could be the ideal remedy.
About Medicine Park
Medicine Park Telephone Company provides telephone, fibre and high speed internet services to approximately 6,000 business and residential subscribers in South Eastern Oklahoma in the city of Medicine Park and surrounding communities. Formed in 1903, it has two subsidiary companies for cable and wireless services.
Challenge
Eli explains the situation: “We had a 240Mbps maximum cut off point and were hitting that upper limit at peak times for at least 3 hours every night.
Latency was terrible, and what was worse is that we had no options from our provider to increase the bandwidth pipe.
As a result of that, we had to turn down internet speeds for individual customers so that the aggregate speed would stay within limits – which left a number of customers dissatisfied.”
Solution
Getting the best out of their existing bandwidth through a suitable caching appliance was the obvious answer. After searching for a number of solutions and testing another appliance, Eli decided that ApplianSys offered the best solution.
“I quickly came to realise that CACHEBOX310 was a lot easier to manage compared with other, more expensive appliances.
“It was very easy to configure it to talk to the router already in place – we literally just plugged it in and everything was up and running in no time,” says Eli.
Result
Since deployment, CACHEBOX has been performing well. It ensured that Medicine Park’s network traffic remained within the maximum bandwidth limit. Consequently, customer services and satisfaction have risen.
“CACHEBOX has been very helpful: During peak times we used to experience poor network performance for up to 5 hours. I do a lot of active traffic monitoring and it’s obvious that we now have a nice gradual slope up to peak, and down from peak. The total overall bandwidth on the internet facing interface has maxed at 219Mbps. With the savings, ping times are steady and there is very little fluctuation of latency.
“A recent example of this was with the Apple iOS 6 release, when we had 33% of traffic consumed by apple.com, but managed to serve 75% of that from cache. At our highest peak in demand, we were serving 300Mbps, with 200Mbps fetched from the internet and 100Mbps from cache – 50% byte hit ratio at that time,” says Eli.
Eli further commented on the impact on customers: “CACHEBOX also makes pages very responsive. I think that’s because even the advertisements on the sides of video web pages like YouTube and Facebook get cached, improving the whole browsing experience.
It has really made a difference to those of our customers who work from home. I’m really pleased and have even recommended CACHEBOX to another company in a similar situation in Dallas.”
