How Capcon replaced 4–5 separate vendors, then cut outage restoration time by more than half.

Sprout Meets Capcon

For years, the telecommunications space has been dominated by large carriers expanding their vast networks and choosing their next market based on profitability, with no regard for the needs of communities. Thankfully, a new trend has emerged: a grassroots movement led by local electric and telephone cooperatives to provide connectivity to their communities and, ultimately, their friends, family, and neighbors. This movement, made up of locally owned broadband providers, is focused on serving their community and providing a reliable internet connection to all of its citizens.

Cullman Electric Cooperative in Alabama was one of many cooperatives to join this movement when they launched Sprout Fiber in June of 2020. By January of 2021, they had connected their first customer, and have since grown to serve over 12,000 subscribers. Specializing in connectivity for rural network operators, Capcon Networks was perfectly poised to be a key component of Sprout's growth.

Board approval for Sprout was first given in November of 2019, and construction began in 2020. Originally, Sprout had multiple 10Gb connections for its backhaul from a provider other than Capcon Networks. Not thrilled with the level of customer service they were receiving, Mark Freeman, Vice President of Network Operations, reached out to a colleague to explore options. That colleague, Mike Neverdusky at Cumberland Connect, suggested he get in touch with Capcon Networks.

When the time came to upgrade those 10Gb connections to 100Gb, Capcon was poised and ready to help scale Sprout's connectivity, while filling in gaps on the support and provisioning front left by previous vendors. As a provider specializing in helping network operators in rural America, Capcon was purpose-built for these types of projects. Capcon and Mark worked side-by-side to find a 100Gb solution that was carrier-diverse, geo-diverse, and ready to scale as fast as Sprout was. The provisioning team at Capcon was Mark's first hint at how different Capcon was from other providers.

“The turn-up process with Lorraine was a great experience! She kept everything moving along and got everything turned up even in the middle of Covid,” Mark says.

Knowledge is Power

Thankfully, the surprises didn't end with the provisioning team. Mark soon learned that Capcon brought a significant amount of industry knowledge and experience, as well as a solution set built specifically for network operators. The upgrade from 10Gb to 100Gb took care of Sprout's need for increased capacity, but Capcon had more to bring to the table.

In order to lower latency and shorten the distance between Sprout users and content providers, Sprout leveraged Capcon's Connect-IX peering solution. Peering allows network operators to exchange traffic directly with other networks, getting their users to Netflix and other content providers even faster.

Since one of the primary concerns of any network architect is security, the next solution Capcon brought to the table was DDoS (distributed denial of service) mitigation. DDoS attacks bring networks to their knees, and having a proactive solution to handle them is a best practice for network operators. Proactively mitigating these attacks can prevent lengthy periods of downtime for users.

Essentially, one provider delivered a scalable, diverse connectivity solution that was optimized for content providers and proactively defended from DDoS attacks. Without Capcon, this same project could have taken four or five vendors.

Being Supportive

So far so good. Four or five vendors had been reduced to one at a competitive price, and Capcon's provisioning team knocked it out of the park. But now the support team was up to bat. Lack of support was one of the reasons Sprout went looking for a better solution in the first place, and the Capcon NOC team didn't disappoint. Mark finally had a 24/7/365 support team to handle his tickets so he could focus on more important things.

Capcon Versus the Competition

Mark and his team were given a great chance to evaluate Capcon's support team directly against their previous vendor in April of 2023. A large-scale outage had the Sprout Fiber team looking for all the support they could get. They reached out to their previous vendor and Capcon Networks around 4:20 AM to let them know that both circuits were down, a 10Gb and a 100Gb from the same underlying carrier. The next several hours proved to be very eye-opening.

The Capcon Networks team worked relentlessly with the underlying carrier, updating Mark and his team regularly until the circuit was confirmed to be up and running at 2:37 PM, about ten and a half hours later. The entire Sprout team was fully informed throughout the process, and was able to work on other aspects of the outage with full confidence that Capcon had things under control.

The process was more underwhelming on the other circuit. With only two email updates from the time the ticket was opened until the circuit went live, the network team at Sprout was largely in the dark. The email confirming that circuit was back up didn't arrive until 3:47 AM the next day.

In addition to being responsive, the Capcon Networks NOC consolidated support from multiple carriers and vendors down to a single phone number and email address. There was no longer any need for Mark and his team to manage multiple support processes for several carriers. If anything went wrong with their connectivity, they just had to reach out to Capcon Networks and then go back to what they were doing.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, Sprout plans to expand its operations further, with a goal of reaching 20,000 subscribers. Reliable, scalable infrastructure provided by Capcon Networks positions the Sprout network well for growth. As Sprout looks to saturate its current market, the team is also exploring opportunities to extend their services beyond their existing territory.

Sprout Fiber's partnership with Capcon Networks has significantly enhanced their ability to serve their community. By addressing critical challenges in connectivity and support, Sprout is now well-equipped to meet the growing demands of their subscribers. Whether it's scaling within their original market or exploring new markets for expansion, Capcon Networks will be there to remove the chaos from connectivity.