One of the first companies to offer Internet service in Santa Barbara is rolling out new features that cater to local small businesses.

Impulse Advanced Communications, based in Goleta, supports businesses and government organizations with a variety of communication services. Impulse has wholesale and interconnection agreements with national Internet, voice and data service providers to serve businesses throughout California.

“We do similar services as Cox Communications and Verizon, but then in addition to that we are a lot more involved with what is going on in a customer’s network from phone, router and switches,” said Chris Rose, director of sales and marketing. “Why people like working with us is we kind of marry the two things. Traditional carriers say here is your connection and we’re out of here. We will go further and help them out. It comes down to being accountable for the whole solution.”

While most of its clients are larger companies such as Deckers Outdoor Corp. and The Towbes Group, Impulse is looking to branch out to small businesses with more reliable, cheaper and faster Internet connections, according to Rose.

“Our objective is to utilize redundancy, offer high download and upload speeds, and create an affordable product for small businesses,” said Rose, adding that redundancy means there is more than one type of wired cables, so if one fails there’s a backup.

Impulse has identified two gaps in small-business Internet connections. Some can afford T1 connections, which offer a reliable, fixed download rate of 1.5 megabits per second, and companies can stack them to increase speeds. But the jump to fiber is too expensive.

Impulse is offering its Broadband Ethernet service, based on ethernet over copper, which provides 5 to 40 megabyte per second upload and download speeds for a similar price to T1.

The service uses eight bonded wires to ensure reliability, and the connection is symmetric, meaning companies can upload data as fast as they download. Upload speeds are becoming more important as more businesses use the cloud, Rose said.

A less expensive service is ADSL 2+ or Next-Gen Broadband, based on the second version of DSL, which can appeal to smaller companies that could use more reliable connections, according to Impulse president Dave Clark.

“It takes the higher download speeds and higher upload speeds than traditional ADSL and creates an affordable product and gives us ability to give them (more than one connection) so they are protected from a failure,” he said.

It’s priced similar to Cox and Verizon services and uses two bonded wires that deliver download speeds from 5 to 30 megabytes per second and upload speeds from 2 to 3 megabytes per second.

Rose said Impulse is creating a small-business division and will hire more staff to better cater to local businesses.

“I don’t think Verizon has paid too much attention to this market, and their speeds haven’t changed in a very long time,” said Rose, adding that it mainly caters to residential and wireless customers. “History shows they aren’t doing much more with the Internet for Santa Barbara businesses, so we thought we needed to step up.”

Just as Impulse was one of the first companies to bring Internet to the area, Rose said it is its responsibility to offer more services to local businesses.

“We’re a smaller market so we don’t get technology first from the big carriers,” he said, “so that’s what we feel our role is.”

— Noozhawk business writer Alex Kacik can be reached at akacik@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.