Regional ISPs Bridge
the Digital Divide
About one-third of the global population, or 2.6 billion people, remain offline.
How will you protect their broadband service?
Globally, escalating DDoS and DNS attacks threaten service provider network availability and disrupt service to targeted downstream customers that provide critical community services, such as hospitals and schools. Adequate protection is essential. In the U.S., BEAD grantees are required to adhere to NIST Framework for Critical Infrastructure Security.

Unprecedented Funding Opportunities in the U.S.
“More than $100 billion in federal funding is being deployed to bring broadband to every American household as part of the largest public investment to connect Americans since the creation of the interstate highway system.”
– McKinsey & CompanyRegional ISPs Must Create Sustainable Business Growth
Growth and Security
69%
Globally expanding to underserved or unserved communities
Service Availability
79%
See organic growth far beyond industry norms
Scarce IPv4 Resources
44%
Lack resources or expertise to complete IPv6 migration
Regional ISPs Play a Key Role
Regional internet service providers (ISPs) have overcome unique challenges with innovative business models. Research from STL Partners identifies key factors to be considered for bridging the digital divide in rural broadband and highlights examples of innovation with ISP case studies.
Higher Access Costs and Lower ROI
- Larger geographic regions, more sparsely populated communities, and difficult terrain drive up costs per customer
- The low revenue per investment dollar makes for a difficult business case
- Alaska Communications used a combination of technologies to reduce the cost of extending broadband coverage
Flexible Core Required for Scale and Security
- Core capacity and IP address pools must be augmented as subscribers and traffic increase
- Security investments must take higher priority as DDoS threats rise
- Managed service providers like Richweb ease the complexity of IP networking
Public/Private Partnerships Ease Financial Burden
- Innovative funding through hybrid ownership, consortia and risk sharing overcomes entry barriers
- Bluewater Regional Networks built premium gigabit fiber connectivity funded by six municipal corporations
- Inland Cellular leveraged the Rural Cloud Initiative ecosystem to provide new services to the agriculture sector
Build customer trust and brand credibility
- Regional ISPs can offer B2B commercial services such cybersecurity, DDoS protection, cloud, managed IT
- Vertical industries such as agriculture, healthcare, energy and education require reliable secure connectivity
- Saddleback Communications provides unified communications as a service for business customers
Innovate from the Core to the Edge
Regional internet service providers (ISPs) must drive innovation across the entire network, end-to-end as they build out broadband access to underserved communities and help bridge the digital divide. Subscriber expectations and cyber threats have risen and ISPs must now reconsider network requirements for security, scalability, and IP connectivity
Critical Core Network Solutions for Urgent Rural Broadband
A10 Defend for Complete DDoS Protection
- Defend Detector – DDoS attack detection
- Defend Mitigator – DDoS attack mitigation
- Defend Threat Control – DDoS threat data
- Defend Orchestrator – Analytics and management
- Zero Day automated protection
Thunder Carrier Grade Networking (CGN)
- Carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT)
- IPv4 to IPv6 migration
- Advanced logging features
- Global management and analytics
- Tier 1 market-proven technology
Critical issues
- Needed to grow customer base
- Mitigate DDoS attacks against IPv4 address pools
- IPv4 address exhaustion limited company’s expansion potential
Results
- Estimated CAPEX savings of 50-79 percent
- ROI achieved in less than one year
- Prevented customer service-affecting outages
- Eliminated manual intervention to mitigate DDoS attacks
- Enabled rapid scale through efficient use of public addresses
Related: A10 Thunder CGN
IN THEIR WORDS
“My favorite part about the day-to-day of using A10 Thunder CGN is it’s not day-to-day…before we were spending several hours per month dealing with DDoS attacks and network issues. This has now been completely mitigated by implementing the A10 solution.”
Network Engineer,
French Broad EMC