The Net in Annapolis, Maryland: High-Speed Access

Business Broadband, Gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet: Annapolis, Maryland High Speed Internet Access

Because of today’s environment, companies in Annapolis depend on the net. Reliable access to the web is the lifeblood of their organization. The company functions of all companies, from Fortune 500 to small companies, depend on fast and reliable access to The net.

Our dependence on Internet access will continue to grow in the coming months and years.

The use of the web is pervasive. We use it for email and data sharing, video chat and VOIP, archiving and commerce. What is the best fix for your needs? A cable modem may be satisfactory. Metro Ethernet? Your needs may be met with Gigabit Internet. Does your Annapolis business need a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg access to The net, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point?

Internet Access: Defining the Company Need

Your organization must assess its real needs. This must be done before an appropriate service can be chosen. Is the net only used for web surfing and email? Will Internet usage mainly involve cloud servers and real time data connection? You may be hosting the data in Annapolis and remote sites rely on this.

How would an outage to your high-speed Internet affect your organization? Will your organization suffer from the lull? Is uptime essential to the success of your business? Before buying, these are several of the questions you need to answer.

Evaluating Different High-Speed Internet Solutions in Annapolis, Maryland

High-speed access to the web is something all companies need. When choosing the right broadband internet for business, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. While many providers throw around terminologies such as:

• High-speed Internet access
• Business Internet service provider
• Broadband cable modem services
• Metro Ethernet
• Gigabit Internet
• MPLS protocol
• Point-to-point circuit protocol
• 5-megabyte access circuits
• Ten megabyte Internet access
• Internet access- 50 megabytes
• High-speed Internet access circuits-100 megabytes
• Sip trunking providers
• Internet access dedicated to you and only you
• … and much more

… you must not lose sight of the real issue, which is understanding what technical solutions best meet your needs.

Business Access: Surfing the internet at Work

For many, if not all, companies in Annapolis, Internet access is needed for at least some employees. Whether it is for organization research, to order supplies or to use third-party applications, the net is required.

Perhaps the size of your work force may determine the solution that best fits your needs. A five or ten megabyte Internet circuit may be all you need if employ a small workforce. If you have a larger workforce, you may want to consider more. This is especially true if they all need to use the net simultaneously.

If your employees are merely accessing an intranet system with limited graphics and video, your need for high-speed Internet may be reduced. On the other hand, if your company requires that its employees download many documents or images and videos, Internet speed becomes more important.

Are you performing backups? You may need to support simultaneous connections to the web in order to sync your backup data. If you conduct remote backups from every workstation, which is advisable, this will be important.

Do you use a file-sharing service? Perhaps you use Google drive, DropBox or a different 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. You must have sufficient bandwidth if you are to successfully support every service including file sharing.

Depending on where you are, you may want to look into high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet. Usually, you can find these in “lit buildings” in Annapolis, Maryland that have been previously wired by a carrier. Adding this high-speed Internet to your office may be surprisingly affordable and easy.

The introduction of Metro Ethernet into a new building can be quite costly. However, bringing that connection into office space within that building is usually less so. Depending on availability, it is often possible to obtain high-speed access to The net with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet in 30 days or less.

Internet-based Applications That Need Access to High-Speed Internet

Ask yourself this: Does we host our own servers to run APIs, websites and data feeds to external offices or organization premises? Are your company headquarters with a hosted application connected to fifty or more satellite offices? Does your office host the point of sale (POS) system for every single store in a large retail chain? Are you a law firm? Do you host data for three or more external locations?

When data and programs are hosted centrally at one main site, people outside that location must gain access. Those people are not able to work without a solid Internet connection. If you need multiple connections to function at the same time from many different locations, make sure that your intranet solution can reliably support it.

A cost friendly 10 Meg circuit or even a cable modem may satisfy the needs of a business with a single office that needs to surf the web. For the headquarters, high-speed Internet access including Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable. High-speed alone is not enough. They must also need to be capable of supporting many diverse connections. A cable modem would likely be insufficient.

Shared Cable Circuits in Annapolis, Maryland Versus Dedicated Internet Bandwidth

In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. You may have to share bandwidth in order to secure that low monthly rate. During peak use hours, you may not be able to reach proper speeds. Many cable companies only deliver a set amount of bandwidth within a community. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?

There are providers who offer dedicated and even guaranteed bandwidth. With these options, bandwidth is yours. It is not shared with anyone outside of your business. Regardless of other tenants in your building or neighboring buildings, you should receive the full capacity of your circuit.

As an example, look at Metro Ethernet. They provide guaranteed bandwidth in various increments. You can receive guaranteed bandwidth in increments of 100, 50, 10 and 5 megabytes. Gigabit speeds from your office to the internet can be reached if you use a gigabit Internet provider.

In these cases, the providers deliver high-speed to the building in sufficient quantity that they can then split their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing each tenant is receiving their contracted speeds.

Annapolis High Speed Organization Internet Circuits: Redundancy

Circuits can go down in Annapolis, Maryland even though certain carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. In what way can you diminish the risk of an outage?

Redundant circuits may be the answer for you.

There are, in essence, two types of redundancy.

With the first type of redundancy, you receive multiple circuits from the same carrier. Redundant circuits can help protect against certain problems. They can mitigate the inconveniences when there is a failure of a physical line or a problem with the port into your router. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. This is not foolproof, but does offer some protection.

The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from different carriers. Using advanced routers and IP address allocations, you can bind these connections together so that, to your users and to the public, it appears and behaves as a single circuit. Truthfully, they are entirely separate. They are redundant and exist in case one of them fails. Diversity redundancy, as this is called, offers you more protection that you might realize. When one carrier has a problem like an outage or some other failure, you have another one that works.

When considering redundant circuits and carriers, try to be sure that the providers you look at in Annapolis, Maryland have different physical geographic routes or pathways. Doing so will maximize redundancy. Your goal should be to get circuits coming into your building on different sides. You do not want them on the same side. They would be on outside phone poles or underground conduits in different directions and leading to different places. By doing this, if there is a significant problem such as a fire at a data center, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.

What is the Price of Not Having Adequate Protection for Your Organization High-Speed access to The Internet?

The cost to your company if you do not have reliable access to The web will be far greater than you may realize. Consider the following:

The phone service in your office relies on Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

Your office uses a cable modem and, in addition to you, the carrier provides 10-15 additional tenants with circuits. During the course of a regular work day, any or all of these other businesses might be performing massive file downloads. Tenants might be taking a large volume of calls or be regularly streaming video. As the amount of accessible bandwidth decreases, what will happen to your needs? What happens to your phone calls? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Will calls be arbitrarily dropped? Will they be full of static?

Your organization functions as the primary data center for multiple external locations

Your office is the center of your business. You may be a law firm that does file sharing or a retailer operating a POS system. All of your offices, whether you have 3 or 3, 000, rely on your primary Internet connection to successfully access data. Your circuit goes down, now what happens? Would it annoy you or destroy you? Can your satellite or remote office do any work at all? Can they take or process any orders at all? Share essential data? Choosing the right solution depends largely on assessing and understanding the specific needs of your company. You might have hundreds and hundreds of loyal customers. Perhaps you are a software company running a hosted solution they all depend on. Is an API utilized in your business so that your customers can access and talk to your system? You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your company servers. Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?

You are call center reliant on VoIP

Maybe your organization depends entirely on the internet. No outbound calls can be made should your circuits go down. Calls coming in would be unanswerable. You might not even know people are trying to reach your office. Your organization is basically done with. Even for the most reputable call centers that already know of and use redundancy, is it sufficient? Are the providers you currently use as reliable as they should be? Are they as reliable as you need them to be? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?

Choosing the Right Annapolis, Maryland High-Speed Organization Access Circuits for Your Company

It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your business needs and budgets will drive your decisions. To summarize:

Your Small Organization and Access to the Internet

You are probably not thinking about redundancy if you have a small organization with a single location. In this case, you can probably get by with a single Internet access circuit of 5, 10 or 50 meg. Find out if you are in a lit building. If so, the price of Metro Ethernet or gigabit service may be affordable. Because prices can vary based on the location of your organization and the availability of circuits, speak with our engineers to learn your options.

Internet Access for the Mid-Sized Company with One Location

You have a mid-sized Annapolis company; higher speed access to The Internet required. You may choose between gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. You may also look into other higher-speed Internet circuits. In a perfect world, you will achieve maximum redundancy by utilizing multiple providers to provide and service different circuits. Achieving this may cost extra but it won’t double your costs. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Again, costs and availability vary. You should speak with our experts to learn the options for your particular location.

Internet Access for Mid-Sized Businesses with Several Locations

Companies with multiple sites are most at risk for failure. They need redundant circuits. Different carriers are desirable. Also, redundant equipment such as switches and routers in your facility can minimize the risk of downtime. Here too, take a careful look and choose the right Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed access to The web circuit providers. The right combination of services and carriers can positively impact the efficiency of your company.

Bigger corporations, enterprise companies and providers of services that are delivered using Internet

To run efficiently and effectively, corporations and businesses that fall into this category must use point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits, gigabit Internet circuits and Metro Ethernet 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. The last thing you want is interruptions or slowdowns affecting your business. You must provide enough bandwidth to avoid these pitfalls that sometimes occur during sudden usage spikes. It is crucial that not only your circuits have the ability to support a vast number of multiple and simultaneous connects, but your hardware must have the ability to support them as well.

Receive a Free Internet Need and Demand Analysis

There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. It is imperative that the circuit or circuits you choose meet your needs but also keep you within your allowable budget. It is important to choose the correct mix of hardware and circuits. Figuring out exactly what to put in the mix, can be a daunting task.

Our expert engineers will review your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. You want your company to run smoothly. We will look at your current usage levels and demand levels and design a plan that meets your needs at a cost that makes sense for you.

Please complete the contact form by clicking here. You may also call our office to set up an appointment for your assessment. We can often provide assessments within 48 hours.