In today’s environment, companies in Amarillo depend on reliable Internet access as the lifeblood of their company. All companies, from Fortune 500 to small companies, have functions that rely on easy, dependable and quick Internet access.
We will, in the months and years ahead, become more and more reliant on our Internet access.
From email to data sharing, video chat to VoIP, and data archiving to Internet commerce, the web is ubiquitous. How can your needs be met? Perhaps a cable modem is all you need. Is Metro Ethernet necessary? Gigabit Internet may be required. What is best for your business in Amarillo, Texas? Will your business needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg Internet access or 100 Meg access to The Internet point?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your business, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Perhaps the net is only used for a few things such as email communication or surfing the web. Is real time data connection with cloud servers vital to your business? Are you hosting the data in Amarillo that remote sites rely upon?
What if there is an outage and your high-speed Internet is interrupted? Can your company afford a long pause or lull in productivity? How much uptime is essential to your organization? Before you buy anything, you must answer these questions.
It is no secret that all companies need high-speed access to the web. An analysis of the costs and benefits should be done prior to choosing the broadband internet that is correct for your organization. You will hear service providers use terms like:
… do not lose sight of the real issues: what are the capabilities and technical solutions you need to best serve your company?
Most companies in Amarillo, Texas require that some or all of their workers have access to the web. Third party applications, organization research or development and e-commerce are just some of the ways the net may be needed.
Your best course of action may be determined by the size of your work force. A 5 or 10 megabyte Internet circuit may be perfect if you only have a few employees. You should consider more than that if you have more workers. Also keep in mind whether your workers need to access the net at the same time.
Perhaps most workers at your company use an intranet system with limited features. High- speed Internet may not be a priority in this case. On the other hand, Internet speed becomes dramatically more important when they are required to regularly download things like documents or videos.
Are you regularly performing backups? When you do remote backups from every workstation, which you should, you must support multiple and simultaneous connections to the web in order to sync your backup data.
Are you using Google drive, DropBox or another file sharing service? This is how a file sharing service works: You save a file. Then the file is pushed to the cloud, and is then synchronized with other people’s computers. Supporting file sharing, while supporting every other service, requires sufficient bandwidth.
Your company location may cause you to think about high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. They are almost always found in “lit buildings” in Amarillo, Texas that are already wired by a carrier. It may be shock you to know that installing high-speed Internet access may not be particularly expensive or inconvenient.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. Depending on availability, it is often possible to obtain high-speed access to The web with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet in 30 days or less.
Does your company host its own servers? Does your company use the hosted servers to run data feeds, APIs or websites for offices or businesses located elsewhere? Maybe your company requires that dozens of satellite offices have access to a hosted application at your company main headquarters. Are you a retail chain hosting the POS system for 12, 000 stores? Are you a law firm hosting data for multiple office locations?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. Those people are not able to do their work if the internet connection fails or is unreliable. Are you picking an intranet solution that provides reliability and stability for your multiple, simultaneous connections from various locations?
For one office or a small organization with just one or two people surfing the web, a less expensive 10 Meg circuit or a cable modem may meet your needs. Company headquarters should have high-speed Internet access such as gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuit. While all offer high speeds, they also need to be capable of supporting multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would not be able to accomplish this.
In many scenarios, bringing in an inexpensive circuit, such as a cable modem, comes at a price. You may have to share bandwidth in order to secure that low monthly rate. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper speeds during peak hours. Only a certain amount of bandwidth may be available in a community. Many cable companies have limits on the amount they can deliver. The bandwidth branches off to the multiple buildings, offices and tenants within them. While you may be capped at thirty-megabyte speed, will you ever reach that speed during company hours? Is it a problem if you get a quarter or even half of the speed you expected?
You can sign up for dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth from some carriers. In this situation, you do not have to share bandwidth. The bandwidth is all yours and is fully allocated to the needs of your company. The full capacity of your circuit should be attainable during all hours regardless of neighboring buildings, people or offices.
Five Meg, ten Meg, fifty Meg and 100 Meg circuits of guaranteed bandwidth are available with Metro Ethernet. Gigabit speeds from your office to the internet can be reached if you use a gigabit Internet provider.
In these situations, each tenant receives their contracted high-speed. The carrier delivers enough so they can split their circuit and provide enough to each tenant.
Amarillo has some providers that offer exceptional Internet bandwidth products and services. However, circuits can still go down and cause disruption. What can you do to minimize the chance that you will experience an outage of some kind?
You may be a candidate for redundant circuits.
Redundancy in this situation comes in two forms.
With the first type of redundancy, you receive multiple circuits from the same carrier. In this situation, the redundancy helps protect you from port issues or physical line issues. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. There is some protection that comes with this but there is risk as well.
The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from different providers. For users and the public, you can make it look like you have one cohesive circuit. You can also make the connections act as a single circuit. You can do this with various advanced routers and IP address allocations. However, despite appearances, they are actually very much separate and are redundant to each other. This is called diversity redundancy and offers more protection that the first. In the event a carrier goes down, you will not have to worry. You will have a perfectly live carrier there to keep things moving.
You should look for redundant circuits from carriers in Amarillo, Texas that do not have the same physical geographic pathways, in order to get the most redundancy. Your goal should be to get circuits coming into your building on different sides. You do not want them on the same side. The circuits would be attached underground or to telephone poles, in various directions. The circuits would go to different data centers or central offices. What if there is some kind of catastrophic incident such as a fire or accident that impacts circuits within a region? Now, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.
The cost to your company if you do not have reliable Internet access will be far greater than you may realize. Think about the following situations:
The carrier you use for your cable modem also provides circuits for a dozen or more tenants in the office building. Between 9 and 5, any of those other offices could be downloading huge files, streaming video or taking large volume of phone calls and more. As they use more bandwidth, there is less for available for your requirements. What happens to your phone calls? How will it affect the quality of that telephone call? Are the calls going to be dropped? Perhaps you will sound choppy or will be inaudible.
Your office may be the working center of an entire organization enterprise. The kind of organization does not necessarily matter. You may be a law firm doing file sharing, an accounting practice sharing databases or a retailer operating a distributed point-of-sale system. All of your locations, whether 2 or 2000, count on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. If your circuit goes done, what happens next? Is it simply an irritation or a catastrophe? Can your satellite or remote office do any work at all? Process or take new orders? Circulate essential files and data? Do you know what your company needs? Be sure to fully understand your requirements. It will help you choose the correct solution. Perhaps you have hundreds of clients or customers that use a hosted solution that your software organization is running. You operate a service that utilizes API in order to grant access to other systems. They may use this to collect whatever data you are offering such as commodity prices, weather data or freight calculations. It is possible they will not be able to connect to your servers. Will your customers remain loyal to you if they have to withstand multiple outages?
Your business is entirely Internet based. Should your circuits go down, your representatives cannot make outbound calls. There would be no way to answer incoming calls of people trying to reach your representatives. Looks like you are now out of business. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Are your current providers as dependable as you would like? Clear and reliable calls are essential. Does your carrier service consistently provide this?
You have no shortage of options. Your decision will be based on different factors including your organization needs and your budget. In review:
Sometimes redundancy is not important to you. For example, If you are a small business, with just one office location, a single access to The Internet circuit may be sufficient. You may get by with one 50, 10 or even 5 megabyte circuit. You may find that if your building is “lit”, gigabit service and Metro Ethernet service may be reasonably cost-effective choices for you. The availability of circuits and your location determine prices; speak with one of our engineers to learn what your best options are.
Having a medium or mid-sized company in Amarillo requires that you have higher-speed access to the web. You have several choices. Consider the following: Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet or higher-speed Internet access circuits. Optimally, multiple providers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. It is sometimes possible to reach this without adding ridiculous costs. For example, one 100-megabyte circuit may cost more than two smaller 50-megabyte circuits. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. You need to speak with one of our experts to determine your options in your specific location.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. They require redundant circuits. It is helpful if they use multiple carriers. Additionally, you should consider redundant equipment (routers and switches) in your facility to minimize the risk of downtime. Have you looked at Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed Internet access circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. The correct combination of providers and services can keep your business running smoothly and efficiently.
Companies such as these require the following: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and point-to-point (PPP) high-speed Internet circuits. In order to maximize and protect your uptime, you must have redundancy. You should have redundant circuits from multiple carriers in addition to redundant hardware. Spikes or sudden increase in usage can result in Internet slowdowns or disruptions in service. You can decrease the risk of these events by having sufficient bandwidth. The hardware and circuits you choose must both be able to support the following: a great number of concurrent, speedy connections.
The danger and risk of failing circuits is tremendous. So is the risk of having less bandwidth than you need. Your demand and budget constraints should both be considered when you decide what circuit or combination of circuits you must have. You have to select the optimal combination of hardware and circuits, which is a daunting task.
Our engineers will analyze your needs and requirements and develop a free action plan for you. Our experts will examine your current usage and demand. We’ll then generate a design that gives you the resources you need while keeping your business up and running at a reasonable cost.
Please click here if you wish to complete the contact form on the side of this page. Alternatively, call our office to schedule an assessment. Your assessment may be finished within as little as 48 hours.