Nicolás Zurakoski, manager of Red Uno, an ISP of Puerto Madryn, and Lucas Giraudo, technician of the Asociación Regional de Cooperativas (ARCOOP) (Regional Association of Cooperatives), of Córdoba shared their investment experiences in a discussion panel, with different models. The new normal prompted new connectivity needs that became a challenge for those calculations.

Red Uno maintains "a very conservative investment model", as defined by Zurakoski. “We never let the use of a switch or a router exceed 30% of its capacity. When we get to that point we are already thinking about what the leap and technological improvement will be”, he said. That was the reason why the jump in demand for connectivity caused by the pandemic and social isolation did not saturate the ISP infrastructure.

In relation to these new connectivity needs, the company deployed a 1,000 meter fiber optic trunk to reach Hospital Zonal Andrés Isola. But then they ran into the problem that there was no infrastructure in the hospital to distribute the 100 Mbps delivered. Red Uno spearheaded the initiative to obtain the necessary elements to achieve this distribution. In addition, once wired, they connected the hospital with the city's health centers for free. The objective was to avoid the concentration of people in the zonal hospital. "This moved many more tools that were not thought of before," said Zurakoski, such as remote consultations with specialized hospitals in the City of Buenos Aires and managing prescription books in the same way.

Red Uno applies the same excess capacity policy for IP transport. Through the two carriers that operate in the city, Red Uno contracts twice the capacity of what is demanded in the peaks. "We are in Patagonia, there may be cuts, mechanical shovels are daily occurrences cutting the fiber, we need this redundancy to have quality of service", he explained.

This type of policy has two consequences. One is that when the demand for connectivity rises by 30% from one day to the next due to the pandemic, the network does not suffer. The other is that they are more expensive policies because the equipment is not pushed to the limit and there is bandwidth that is bought and is idle.

Meanwhile, Lucas Giraudo explained the investment process in a totally different model. The Asociación Regional de Cooperativas (ARCOOP) brings together 23 organizations of this type that provide communications services in small towns in the interior of the province of Córdoba, with a network deployment of more than 300 kilometers. ARCOOP negotiates the purchase of bandwidth for the group, today in 14 GB, and then delivers them to each one (with needs between 300 and 500 MB); All the cooperatives pay for general and maintenance expenses and the remainder is used by ARCOOP to finance expansion into new cooperatives. Most of them are already starting with FTTH based on previous HFC deployments.

Regarding investments, this year will be dedicated to reinforcing the structure that grew during the pandemic. “The demand for bandwidth doubled. To satisfy it, subnodes were made in the network, with their corresponding laying and energy security”, said Giraudo. Those improvements forced by the pandemic were already planned and took a good part of the investment resources.

However, ARCOOP has a new vector of development in the television head, developed with the same association criteria to buy bandwidth: in this case, unifying the heads into one, which implies a reduction in costs, allows offering a package of channels to customers at a competitive price". The last cooperatives were linked by the television head", said the ARCOOP technician.