Provider Spotlight: Q &A with Pavlov Media

Roxana Ryan
Published: October 10, 2012
Related to: Northeast Central eTeam

Pavlov Media was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Downtown Champaign. The company employs 95 people with 85 in Champaign/Urbana.  Pavlov Media operates in 37 states in more than 140 markets throughout the country. 

 1.  Are you serving any interesting anchor institutions or businesses that are using your services to do innovative things? We primarily serve what are known as “bulk” properties—often student housing, apartments or condos. Our company is one of the nation’s largest private providers of broadband services (Video, Data and Voice) to multi-family real estate owners. In addition, Pavlov Media, the City of Champaign and the Champaign Center Partnership kicked off the new upgraded Downtown Wi-Fi Network in Champaign on September 14. Our CEO Mark Scifres said, “The enhanced downtown network is both a showcase of how technology can help a community and a demonstration of the benefits of the downtown areas in our community.”

 2.  Explain the "Tesseractiv" service offered by Pavlov. Tesseractiv is a technology that combines proprietary hardware and software to provide an Internet experience that we believe is greatly superior to what most people currently receive.  Tesseractiv delivers on-net content, which is the most popular content, at speeds up to 1,000 Mbps and we will soon increase even that speed. The word “Tesseract” was also used in the popular novel “A Wrinkle in Time”.  Author Madeleine L'Engle used the concept of a “tesseract” to describe traveling between stars faster than the speed of light. Pavlov Media believes that this new technology is faster and better than interactive and so we coined the phrase Tesseractiv.

3.  Are you doing any network upgrades or expansions anywhere? We are working on a national backbone to add more capacity and extend our reach across the United States.

4.  What are some of your greatest challenges or obstacles in getting subscribers and/or upgrading your network?  As a bulk provider, a few challenges stand out.  First might be getting circuit capacity, especially in rural areas, that is affordable and can handle the speeds we provide.  There are marketing challenges as well.  We face competition from sizable providers that spend tens of millions in advertising in-state, making their name well known. 

5. Tell us about recent investments you've made in your infrastructure. We have deployed 8 colo’s at 30 terabytes each and one at 108 terabytes with a goal of having a petabyte of content by end of first quarter 2013.

6.  Do you have a newsletter, Facebook, etc? Yes, visit www.facebook.com/PavlovMedia.