What a weekend! Friday, I deep fried a seasoned turkey breast and made a salad for Gay and a sandwich for me. Deep fried turkey is very different from fried chicken. It doesn’t use flour or batter and the end result is very juicy and flavorful. If you make this dish, remember to brine the turkey breast overnight. Finally, since there are just two of us, I always saw the breast down the middle so I have two halves. Your butcher can do this for you as well. Then cook half the breast which better fits feeding two to four people leaving the other half in the freezer for another time. Saturday, I made hamburgers. I double ground the beef and serve it with smoked apple wood bacon on a pretzel bun. I love pretzel hamburger buns. Sunday, I decided to make a surf and turf dinner with a pan seared filet and crab tossed in an updated aioli, more on that in a moment. This was served with a simple salad and olive oil poached garlic cloves and potato medallions. The garlic was terrific. I liked it better than the oven roasted variety although both are good. The potatoes were incredibly creamy and had taken on just a hint of the garlic flavor but showed off the brightness of the olive oil. However, let’s go back to the aioli. I learned over the weekend that in Spain there are hundreds of versions. This gave me an idea. To the basic aioli, I added mace and a bit of tomato paste. I mixed some of the aioli with lump crab which topped the filet. Mace works very well with seafood and it worked really well in this surf and turf presentation. Aioli with Mace and Tomato Paste is the recipe of the week. Enjoy!

Hundreds of Options

In examining criteria for bandwidth selection, we (the marketing team) decided that there were seven worthy of conversation. The first is to understand the number of endpoints.

Knowing the number of users is a starting point but it will not be enough to determine the amount of broadband required. It is more important to perform an audit of your company looking at all of the endpoints that require broadband access. This includes servers that access the Internet for cloud based applications or to communicate and share data with the ecosystem of the business. Other not so obvious endpoints include devices that access your network wirelessly such as I do when I visit other Broadvox offices (It is easier than looking for a LAN connection). Estimating the number of traveling employees and guest that will require broadband and collecting data on the number of devices used that are typically not counted, such as tablets or second laptops or PCs. Also, measure the intra-company broadband demand between locations. Finally, look at the growth of the business. How many more endpoints will be added over the next six months, year or the term of the agreement? This is an important consideration in determining the type as well as amount of broadband to acquire.

Once you have a true understanding as to the number of connections we move to the second decision criterion. How will the broadband be used? I’ll cover that on that Wednesday.