We do. It won’t work with any other service, and therefore is useless without an active Steele Net account, and so it’s not fair of us to make you buy hardware that will only work with us. So we lease it to you, which is part of the monthly fees. We always own the hardware, replace it if it breaks, upgrade it when necessary and all that. When you’re done with it, you send it back to us. You’re not stuck with hardware you can’t use that way.
Hopefully, you’re happy with the service we provide and will continue to use it! If you are, nothing changes which we are sure you will be however If you aren’t, simply send the equipment back to us. Once we receive it back, we will cancel your service and that’s it.
I’m afraid not, the way our technology works requires us to assign a new IP address. Unless you’re a large corporation who already owns an IP block (and you’re willing to provide them to us), we can only provide an IP that we own.
No worries, talk to us and we can provide as many IP’s as you need.
Sure, if you are within range of one of our qualified partners this is part of the install. If not, we are happy to work with your local IT guys and talk them through the simple setup process. Honestly though, it’s so simple even the PM could do it. Everything comes labelled, and if you have any issues we are on the phone ready to guide you.
If you really need the ultimate in redundancy, you can have it on request. This works by having a separate bonder for each service. Each bonder takes care of it’s own service, independent of the other. They are controlled by a Master Control Unit that synchronizes the bonders together and presents the data to your router. That way, if one bonder stops working, you will only lose 1 service. You’ll run slower than usual, but you will keep running. Should the Master Control Unit fail, you have a spare to replace it with, which takes a minute to do – keeping downtime to the bare minimum.
Part of the monthly cost is for the lease of the bonder. So you don’t need to worry about warranty, if your bonder fails it will be replaced at no cost to you – no matter how long you’ve had it for. If it needs to be upgraded, we do that as part of the lease.
No they aren’t. ISP’s simply cannot offer the same technology as Steele Networks – what they offer is a modem that has a 4G USB stick plugged into it. When the NBN fails, the modem will take a long time to realise, and then even longer to make the switch. One the switch is made, your public IP has changed. Any calls you were on are now gone, that sales lead or possible new client along with it. If you have remote branches, they can’t connect anymore. And to make matters worse, some ISP’s only provide this service for their phone calls, meaning you still can’t access the internet.
No, ISP’s most certainly do not offer the same service as Steele Networks. In this case, you definitely get what you pay for.
No problem, it can be hard to understand without seeing it. Call today to book in a free, no-obligation web meeting where we can show off exactly how our technology works, and give you a hands-on demonstration – as well as being able to talk face-to-face. Sometimes, seeing something in action is the only way to fully understand what’s happening.
We can, but we recommend having at least one other service with another ISP – purely because internet problems can often be ISP-specific. Having your services spread across as many ISP’s as possible reduces the chance of being down as much as possible.
Anyone. Our technology is ISP-Independent, meaning you can choose the ISP that suits your business model best. Telstra doesn’t have good service where you are? Go with a carrier that does, no problem. Want to change providers? No problem! Just give us the new details of your service, and you’re done. Best part is, during the changeover from ISP to ISP there will be no downtime if you have at least 1 other service (bonded or failover).
We highly recommend using your own router. You won’t have access to the Bonder to be able to make changes such as port forwards, or DHCP ranges. Although we can make these changes for you, it’s much better for all parties if you continue to manage your internal network from your own device, and let us manage your connection to the outside world.
No. So long as your router can be configured into DHCP mode, we can provide a static public IP address. So far we haven’t found a single Router that doesn’t work – from a basic home router through to enterprise equipment such as Mikrotik and Ubiquiti, they all simply plug and play.
It’s very hard to know each service you might rely on, but if you talk to your IT department/consultant and inform them your public IP address will change, they should be able to provide a list of items that may be affected. Some things might be: scan-to-email on printers (depending on the setup), remote access to servers or services, in-house VoIP systems, Routers, etc. If you have any 3rd-party service providers (software or hardware), you may want to talk to them to see what implications changing your public IP might have.
If you are noticing a slow down particularly of an afternoon or evening at similar times each day, there’s a high chance it’s either contention or traffic shaping.
What is contention?
Contention can be controlled at the ISP end, but it could also be caused by the local infrastructure. If an ISP doesn’t have enough bandwidth to supply all of their customers during peak times, this is when you will see a slow down as they do not have the capacity to supply you with your full allotted bandwidth amount. You will normally see this with the “budget” ISP’s.
Imagine the internet as a highway, and your ISP owns several lanes of this highway. If they have 3 lanes, and only light traffic, that traffic will have no problems keeping to the speed limit and arriving on-time. However, if the ISP has heavy traffic, and still only 3 lanes – that’s a LOT more cars trying to fit on the same amount of highway and suddenly there’s a traffic jam. The solution would be to add more lanes, but in the case of some ISP’s (AKA the budget ones), they cut their running costs by forcing all their traffic into their insufficient lanes and suddenly all their clients suffer contention.
Infrastructure contention is based on your local infrastructure, if there is not enough capacity to your area during peak times you may also see slow downs during peak periods. This is a common scenario on fixed wireless towers.
In this case, the limit might not necessarily be the ISP – there simply might not be enough lanes on the highway to buy.
What is traffic shaping?
Traffic shaping can happen for a number of reasons, the main reason is you have exceeded your data limit. Another reason is generally a late account or bill. Your ISP is the only one that can generally answer why you have been shaped.
Following the highway illustration: This is like having roadworks on the highway, and the speed limit is reduced from 110KM/H to 40KM/H and all but one lane has been blocked. Traffic that is used to going through multiple lanes is now bottlenecked and will take much longer to reach its destination.
Does Steele Networks shape traffic?
No, our data centers always have more then enough capacity to deal with all customers requirements during peak times. We will never contend or shape anyone’s paid active service.
Again with the highway analogy: Steele Networks won’t slow you down, we will put you in the toll lane. You get to keep going full speed, but it’s going to cost you at the end.
No. Whilst you will be given a new public IP, this service does NOT replace your current connection; it simply sits “on top” of it, and utilizes it to provide bonding, failover or both (depending on what you choose to go with). It is important to understand that you will receive an invoice from Steele networks as well as your current ISP.
Single IP failover means you will retain the same IP address no matter what connection is currently active, weather you are bonding ten lines or one with a failover. This will not only assist with stability of phone systems etc. Its a huge benefit for main sites that need to retain the same IP address for VPN tunnels and other inbound services.
We will notify you if you are reaching your assigned data limit with Steele Networks. However it is the customers responsibility to check data usage on attached broadband services such as, VDSL/ADSL/4G/3G. We suggest setting up text notifications for your data limits on your 4/3G as more often then not these services are quite expensive if you go over your limit.
We can essentially bond any connection yes. The only caveat is if you have a very unstable connection our bonding weighting system will find it difficult to constantly re adjust values. This will somewhat hinder the potential output of our bonding service.
We know we have the best 4G failover on the market, for the following reasons:
- not only do you retain your static IP when your connection fails over, but It will failover to the 4G and – back again – and so fast you probably won’t even know it happened.
- At worst, if you’re on the phone at the time you may notice a very brief interruption, almost as though your office drove through a tunnel. After a second or two your call will continue uninterrupted.
- Once your main broadband connection returns our system will detect and test your main connection. Once its satisfied with the stability of the connection it will hand the connection back to your main broadband connection, with no down time.
- VPN Tunnels and other services that rely on a static IP won’t be affected whatsoever, unlike the “similar” services provided by ISP’s.
Go and ask any other providers of failover whether they can offer the same 4 points, we will be here when you get back!