Every business today relies on the internet to fuel its operations. From online booking tools for barbershops and fitness studios to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices in advanced factories, we trust that we’ll have the connectivity to keep things moving.
Unfortunately, it’s that dependency on connectivity that can cost our businesses when an outage occurs. In 2022, a major telecom’s customers were affected by one of the largest and most disruptive outages in Canadian telecom history. Everything from payment and emergency services to hospitals and transportation were disrupted for an entire day.
It’s a scenario that TERAGO president and CEO Dan Vucinic said businesses can mitigate.
“You need that performance, resiliency, and diversity because when the internet stops working then everything stops,” he said.
Markham-based TERAGO delivers that performance, resiliency, and diversity to business customers across Canada. Founded in 1999, the company began as a fixed wireless provider and spent the next 25-plus years investing in innovation.
Today, TERAGO owns its own national wireless network, 91% of the mmWave wireless spectrum, and has over 100 Canadian and international partner providers to provide carrier and technology diverse primary and secondary connectivity.
“There is no one out there like TERAGO,” Vucinic said.
“What we've all experienced over the years where construction or an accident damages a cable. You may have thought you had backup because you used two cable providers, but the two cables were buried in the same conduit that got cut down the street,” he said.
TERAGO combines fibre in the ground with fixed wireless in the air so that if one goes down, your business's internet connectivity stays live.
“Our team will go out and figure out what the art of possible is at each location and then put a solution together for them that can be implemented across Canada,” he added.
In addition to managed connectivity, TERAGO also offers Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) services to manage multiple connections, security, and application traffic under one invoice and also deploy and manage bespoke private 5G networks inside factories to connect machines, cameras, autonomous robots, and AI systems.
“More and more customers and reaching out about our managed services,” Vucinic said. “They've been trying to self-manage multiple sites with different contracts, and it just becomes too much to manage. We simplify that for them as we design highly resilient and redundant solutions and then manage the delivery and service for all the connections and put everything on one simple invoice.”
Building the company in Markham was an easy choice for Vucinic.
“Markham's always had a really strong reputation as a technology and innovation hub and our headquarters are very close to all these high-tech companies,” he said. “That's been a big advantage for us to not only work with those businesses, but you also get inspired by the energy, innovation, and collaboration.”
From advanced manufacturing to next-generation semiconductor development, Vucinic said TERAGO is proud to be part of Markham’s tech ecosystem.
“There's a lot of manufacturing, a lot of technology. I don't know if we could call it a Silicon Valley type, but it's kind of our GTA valley of innovation—that's Markham,” he said.
