Astound Managed SD-WAN Reviews

We're a church, and we use the WiFi primarily for laptops and our offices. We don't have an onsite server, so everything is hosted on Microsoft Cloud.

We use this solution primarily for our office staff during the week. The key reason we went with Astound was for the speed. We stream our services, both audio and video, on Sundays. Our biggest usage is on Sundays. 

We have an admin layer for our staff, a worship team layer for our audio, and a video team.

We host Office 365 and Adobe on our computers. We also have a surveillance system that ties into the unit, but that's a separate video recorder. We have 17 access points, which are our WAPS that feed from it.

At our peak, we had 190 users. There are 600 people in the building, and we only use 10% of our bandwidth.

This solution provides visibility that helps us increase network performance.

Astound is adequate, sufficient, and gives us room to grow.

We're a church, a nonprofit, and we use it for everyday office work, for video uploading and downloading, live streaming, video conferencing, video calling, and networking. We use it as guest WiFi as well.

Moving from the system we had into this fiber optic system with the WiFi and the SD-WAN has simplified the amount of gear we need. It has made things really obvious, from the beginning of the signal path to the end, where everything is. Since it is all installed and set up at the same time, it all works together really nicely. It communicates and it tells you where everything is. It allows us to do more of the church-serving, which is our primary mode of operation, and not waste time having to become Google and YouTube IT stars.

It's super easy to manage the various network connections. We have a couple of different areas around the property where we send hard lines and have set certain things up with static IPs. It's just a huge improvement compared to where we came from. I can get in, configure, identify, and reconfigure, and I don't have to troubleshoot anything. It's all very easy and flows really well.

Having a solid signal strength around our whole property, in all the places that we wanted things mapped, makes it easier for us to do more WiFi-reliant things. We're not limited to a centralized office area where we had to connect everything and it was like a game of "Risk." As we walked away from the office, we would see how many steps we could take before losing connection. Now, we're fully confident that someone can walk to the edge of our property and still have a full signal. That has increased what we're able to do and how we do our jobs as ministry directors and pastors.

We've been able to add more internet-based solutions to our day-to-day operations, whether it's cloud-based servers or systems, or gear that works optimally over a WiFi signal. We weren't able to do that prior to the fiber optic solution because of the lack of signal and strength.

We have an app, but it's tough to get people to use it when we are offering poor WiFi. With the fiber optic solution, we're fully confident that when we ask several hundred people at one time to hop onto an app and do something, the system is not even going to bat an eye. It's going to run like a champ. It lets us optimize our workflow because it's running an optimized setup for us.