Santa Rosa Communications launches managed service with Juniper Mist Wi-Fi

Santa Rosa Communications is a leader in delivering gigabit Internet to residential homes, apartments, and businesses in North Texas and Southern Oklahoma. The company started in the 1950s to bring phone service to farmers and ranchers and has been building fiber to homes and businesses since 2001.

“Wi-Fi has been a thorn in our side,” says Seth Tabor, CTO of Santa Rosa Communications. “Customers just want their phones and tablets to work well, and they don’t care about the technical stuff.”

PCNet, a subsidiary of Santa Rosa Communications, now offers a managed network service based on Juniper wireless, driven by Mist AI.

Overview


Company Santa Rosa Communications
Industry Service Provider
Region Americas
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Customer Success At-a-glance

80% faster

 to deploy Juniper Mist than competitors

30 minutes

to get a new Wi-Fi customer live

Ease of customer management

and maintenance on one dashboard

 

Greater flexibility

in end user management and system segregation

Challenge

Meeting customer expectations for great digital experiences

Tabor long sought a solution that would rise to meet customer expectations and be operationally simple. “We tried several wireless LAN manufacturers but they took a lot of care and feeding,” he says.

Santa Rosa relies on Juniper Networks® MX Series Universal Routing Platform for its core network, and Tabor got a tip to look at Juniper Mist.

Tabor tested out Juniper Access Points at the head office.

“Juniper Mist was simple to deploy, rock-solid reliable, and easy to troubleshoot,” he says. “It was a totally different experience than any other wireless LAN we tried before.”

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Solution

A managed network service that frees up customer and provider

The PCNet managed network service is based on Juniper Mist.

Juniper Access Points work in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud Architecture and Mist AI to deliver optimized wireless experiences. The network team can set service level expectations and maintain continuous visibility into the customer experience.

“Finally, a wireless system that troubleshoots from the client’s viewpoint,” says Tim Jacobi, network/wireless engineer at PCNet. “With Juniper Mist and Marvis, we have a 24/7 virtual technician monitoring the wireless network taking the guesswork out of troubleshooting and deployment.”

Wi-Fi Assurance replaces manual troubleshooting tasks with automated operations. Marvis Virtual Network Assistant simplifies troubleshooting with self-driving actions and real-time answers.

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Outcome

Strong demand for Wi-Fi that simply put “just works”

With tight control over service levels, Santa Rosa and PCNet can meet customer expectations with great connectivity across a variety of environments such as apartment buildings, offices, and nursing homes.

“With Juniper, we can manage firewalls, switches, and wireless all the way to the end customer,” says Tabor. “We have the visibility and data to know that we are delivering the best experience.”

Santa Rosa is integrating Mist Cloud with its billing and operational systems. “The Mist API is amazing and there is an awesome tool repository to accelerate integration,” he says.

“Juniper is a competitive differentiator for Santa Rosa Communications,” Tabor says. “Customers want to stay with us and buy more services because their experiences are so good.”

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Published March 2021