The lifeblood of Barnstable Town, Massachusetts companies doing business in the current environment depends on reliable Internet access. All companies, from Fortune 500 to small businesses, have functions that rely on easy, dependable and quick access to The Internet.
In the coming months and years, we’ll become increasingly reliant on our access to the web.
The use of the net is pervasive. We use it for email and data sharing, video conferencing and VOIP, archiving and commerce. What is the best fix to meet your needs? Is a cable modem sufficient? Metro Ethernet? Gigabit Internet may be required. Does your business in Barnstable Town, Massachusetts need one of these: 10 Meg Internet access, a 100 Meg access to The Internet point, a 50 meg circuit or a 5 meg circuit?
Before selecting the appropriate service, your company must assess its needs. Will web surfing and email be your primary use of the net? Is it used to network with cloud servers? Are you hosting data in Barnstable Town? Do remote places depend upon you?
What if your high-speed Internet is disrupted by an outage? What will happen to your organization? Can your company afford a long pause or lull in productivity? Is uptime essential? You must answer questions like these so you can make a purchase that actually meets your needs
In the broadest of terms, companies need high-speed access to The net. When picking the correct broadband internet, balancing the costs and benefits to your company is imperative. Many providers toss out terms such as:
… be sure not to forget what capability and technical solutions meet your business’s specific needs.
Workers for most companies in Barnstable Town have some need to access the net during the course of their job. It may be needed for company research, to order office supplies or other reasons.
Your best course of action may be determined by the size of your work force. If you only have a few workers, you may be fine with a smaller Internet circuit such as a 5 or 10 megabyte. If you have 50 employees who are using the internet simultaneously, you may need more.
High-speed Internet may become less important if the majority of your employees primarily use an intranet system with limited graphics and video. On the other hand, when they are frequently downloading documents, images and videos, that need for speed increases drastically.
Are you performing backups? Simultaneous connections to the web, which you need in order to sync your backup data, require support. If you conduct remote backups from every workstation, which you definitely should, this will be important.
Does your company use a file sharing service? DropBox? Google drive? After a file is saved, it goes to the cloud and then to someone else’s computer. The right amount of capacity or bandwidth is necessary to support this function in conjunction with every other service you have.
Depending on your location, high-speed organization Internet access, including Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options. They are commonly found in “lit buildings” in Barnstable Town, Massachusetts that have already been wired by a carrier. Installing high-speed Internet may not be as difficult and expensive as you think.
If you have to bring Metro Ethernet into a new building, it can be expensive but bringing that connection to an office or suite within the building is usually not. In fact, obtaining high-speed Internet access with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet can often take 30 days or less depending upon availability.
Do you have your own business servers that run APIs, websites or feeds for offsite offices or companies? Are your corporate headquarters with a hosted application utilized by 50 branch offices? Are you a retail company with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different places?
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 web connection fails or is unreliable. If you need multiple connections to function at the same time from many different sites, make sure that your intranet solution can reliably support it.
For one office or a small company with just one or two people surfing the web, a less expensive 10 Meg circuit or a cable modem may meet your needs. For headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. While fast Internet access is and important, they must also have the capability to handle assorted simultaneous connections. A cable modem would likely be insufficient.
Utilizing a cable modem or other less expensive circuit may seem like a good option but can result in unexpected cost. You may have to share bandwidth in order to secure that low monthly rate. While you may subscribe to a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection, you may be unable to reach those speeds during peak hours. Many cable operators can only deliver a certain amount of bandwidth in a community. That bandwidth branches off to different buildings and then to various tenants within those buildings. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? Will there be trouble if your expectation is set at 30 but you only get 8 or 10?
You can sign up for dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth from some carriers. If you want your very own bandwidth that is not used by anyone else, you should consider this. No matter who is in the building or what buildings surround you, you should always run at full speed.
With Metro Ethernet, for example, you can receive a guaranteed bandwidth in various increments including 5 and 10 Meg circuits, and 50 and 100 Meg circuits. In your office out to the web you can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit providers
Carriers in these situations deliver enough to cover everyone’s needs. The providers divide their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing that everyone gets their contracted speed.
Despite outstanding Internet bandwidth products offered by carriers in Barnstable Town, Massachusetts, circuits do go down. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?
Redundant circuits.
Redundancy in this situation comes in two forms.
A single carrier, providing multiple circuits, to one customer, characterizes one form of redundancy. 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. If that carrier has a wide reaching outage or there is a line broken or damaged outside of your building, both circuits may go down. While there is some protection, there is also some risk.
Bringing in circuits using two distinct providers is the second form of circuit redundancy. Advanced routers and IP address allocations can be utilized to make it look to your users and the public that you have a single circuit. But, you know that they are actually separate and redundant. While circuit redundancy in general is a good idea, diversity redundancy by using different providers, offers far better protection. You will still have a live, fully functioning carrier if one fails.
To maximize the benefit of redundancy, consider looking for redundant circuits from different providers that have different pathway in Barnstable Town, Massachusetts. Essentially, this just means that you do not want both of your circuits to enter the building on the same side. They should come in on different sides. They would be on outside phone poles or underground conduits in different directions and leading to different places. In this way you have redundancy in different physical directions. If there is an event that causes a regional circuit problem, you have an alternative that is unaffected.
The cost of dependable access to The net pales in comparison to the cost of unreliable access. Consider the following:
Is your company on a cable modem? How many other tenants is your carrier servicing in your building? Are 14 other offices getting circuits? What if any or all of those tenants are huge call centers taking in a massive volume of phone calls, are business that perform large file downloads or stream many videos? As available bandwidth shrinks, what will happen to your calls? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Are calls dropped? Will you sound muffled?
Your office is the hub of your company, whether you are a retail organization operating a distributed point of sale (POS) system, an accounting firm sharing databases or a law firm engaged in file sharing. All of your offices, whether you have 3 or 3, 000, rely on your primary Internet connection to successfully access data. What will happen if your circuit crashes? Will it cause disastrous results of just annoy you a little bit? Can your satellite offices perform any work at all? Can they take or process any orders at all? Dispense and receive data? Be sure you understand your requirements fully before choosing a solution. Perhaps you have hundreds of clients or customers that use a hosted solution that your software organization is running. Is an API utilized in your business so that your customers can access and talk to your system? It is possible they will not be able to connect to your servers. Multiple outages may annoy your customers.
Your company is 100% dependent on the web to properly function. If your circuits go down, you cannot make calls. There would be no way to answer incoming calls of people trying to reach your representatives. Basically, you are out of organization. Is redundancy enough? Are you really getting the dependable service you need form your carriers? Are you using providers that are truly reliable? Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
You clearly have many options. Your business needs and budgets will drive your decisions. Essentially:
A single fifty, ten or five megabyte Internet access circuit may be sufficient to meet the needs of your small company, particularly if you have only one location and are not worried about redundancy. Is your building lit? If so, find out about gigabit or Metro Ethernet services. They may be reasonably priced options. Speak with our engineers about what is right for you. Prices vary with location and circuit availability.
If you have a midsized company in Barnstable Town, Massachusetts, you will need higher-speed access to The Internet. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Optimally, multiple carriers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. You can sometimes achieve this without doubling costs. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Remember, costs vary. So does availability. Call one of our experts to learn what is available in your specific area.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of business or offices. Redundancy is extremely crucial to them. Having several providers would afford extra protection. In addition, consider redundant equipment. Redundant routers and switches can minimize risk also. Have you looked at Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed access to The Internet circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. The right mix of carriers and services will help keep your business up and running as efficiently as possible.
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. You absolutely need redundant circuits from different providers as well as redundant hardware. This is important to ensuring uptime. 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. Both your hardware and circuits must be capable of supporting a vast number of simultaneous and fast connections.
The risk of insufficient bandwidth or failing circuits is tremendous. You must select the single circuit or multiple circuits that can meet your demands and stay within your budget. The pressure involved in selecting the proper mix of hardware and circuits can be overwhelming.
We have experts to help. Our engineers will do an analysis of your needs and requirements, and develop a free action plan for you based on their findings. We will look at your current usage, demand levels and scope out a design to give you the resources you need while keeping your organization up and running at a reasonable cost.
You can complete the contact form on the right side of this page by clicking here. If you would prefer, please call our office to set up an appointment for an assessment. Assessments are completed in as little as 48 hours.