Every Address Has a Right Answer, We Find It

Carrier pricing varies enormously by circuit type, speed, SLA tier, contract length, and address. A fixed wireless backup circuit in a dense Madison area is a different conversation than a dedicated fiber circuit in rural Dane County. After we confirm what’s actually available and installable at your address, we provide written quotes from the appropriate carriers for side-by-side comparison. No placeholder numbers.

Our current partner stack includes Hoyos Consulting and ResTech Services (both Madison-local with fiber and fixed wireless), TDS Telecom (Madison-headquartered regional carrier), Spectrum Business and AT&T Business (national carriers with coverage across our service area), and additional carriers as needed based on your address. We’re vendor-agnostic, we recommend what’s right for your location, not what fills our quota.

Fiber is a physical cable to your building, fastest speeds, lowest latency, most reliable, usually symmetric upload and download. Requires fiber infrastructure to already be near your address (if not, construction can take weeks or months). Fixed wireless uses radio signal from a carrier tower to an antenna on your building, faster to install, works in locations without fiber, but requires line-of-sight and is typically asymmetric (upload slower than download). Fixed wireless also makes a great backup circuit on a different path from fiber.

Your firewall or router is configured with both primary and secondary WAN links. It continuously monitors the primary (typically via upstream ping, DNS checks, or carrier protocol signals). When it detects a failure, it shifts outbound traffic to the backup circuit, typically within seconds to under a minute, depending on the detection method and tuning. VoIP calls in progress may need to re-register on the backup path; cloud app sessions usually survive. When the primary recovers, traffic shifts back (or stays on the backup, depending on your policy). The exact switchover time depends on which firewall we deploy (OPNsense, Cisco, or Ubiquiti typically) and how aggressively we tune the health checks.

We verify during the site survey. If line-of-sight isn’t available from your building to a carrier tower, options include intermediate relay points (sometimes viable with roof access), a different fixed wireless carrier with a different tower footprint, or a non-wireless alternative like DOCSIS cable or cellular-based backup. We’ll tell you honestly what’s possible at your address.

Depends on the carrier. Some offer month-to-month terms at a premium; most prefer 1- to 3-year contracts with better rates. Install-cost recovery is sometimes amortized into the term. We review contract language before you sign, particularly auto-renewal clauses, rate-increase language, and early termination fees, and flag anything that would lock you in badly.

Either or both. Common patterns: primary only (we source and manage one circuit), primary + failover (two circuits from different carriers for redundancy), or failover-only (we add a diverse backup to your existing primary). We’ll recommend the right setup based on your uptime requirements and budget.

SLA terms come from the underlying carrier, we don’t manufacture them. Different carriers publish different SLA tiers (typically 99.9% for standard business, higher for dedicated Internet access with financially-backed terms). We match the SLA tier to your actual uptime requirement during the recommendation phase. Paying for a 99.99% SLA you don’t need is wasted money; settling for 99% when you can’t absorb outages is risk you shouldn’t take.

Yes. For PCI DSS we scope dedicated circuits for cardholder data environments where that simplifies audit boundaries. For HIPAA we configure traffic segmentation so clinical data flows don’t mix with admin or guest traffic on the same edge. For 42 CFR Part 2 we add egress controls and enhanced logging on circuits carrying behavioral-health PHI. Compliance scope is part of the recommendation conversation, we scope the circuit to fit the requirement rather than making the requirement fit whatever circuit was easiest to order.

Three reasons: (1) Carriers only sell you their own service, we compare all of them. (2) When something breaks, you get one support line (ours) instead of sitting on hold with the carrier’s outage queue. (3) We catch the contract language, SLA gaps, and rate-increase clauses that carriers gloss over during the sales call. Pricing through us is typically the same as direct, the carriers pay us to deliver managed customers, not markup.