Today’s environment demands that companies in Bossier City, Louisiana have reliable Internet service in order to run their company. All companies, large and small, need fast and reliable Internet access.
We’ll become increasingly reliant on Internet access as the months and years progress.
From email messaging to information sharing, e-commerce to archiving data, and voice over IP to video chat, the net is omnipresent. What is the right solution for your requirements? Is a cable modem sufficient? It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Your needs may be met with Gigabit Internet. Your Bossier City, Louisiana organization probably needs a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point but which one is best?
Before selecting the appropriate service, your organization must assess its needs. Are surfing the web and sending email the only uses of the web? Is connecting with cloud servers and sharing real time data the main use of the web? There may be remote locations that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Bossier City.
What if your high-speed Internet is disrupted by an outage? What will happen to your business? Will your company suffer from the lull? Is the absence of uptime detrimental? Prior to making any purchases, you must determine the answers to these questions.
It is no secret that all companies need high-speed access to the net. When picking the correct broadband internet, balancing the costs and benefits to your company is imperative. Don’t be distracted by terminology. While you may hear providers throw out words and phrases like:
… the real issue is understanding what capability and technical solutions best meet your needs.
Companies in Bossier City, Louisiana need access to the internet for their employees. Some companies may need it only for a few people and others may need it for the entire workforce. Third party applications, business research or development and e-commerce are just a few of the ways the net may be needed.
The solution you choose may be based on the number of employees you have or expect to have. If you have a smaller workforce, you may do fine with a smaller Internet circuit. For example, if you only employ a handful of people, a 5 or 10 Meg circuit may meet your needs. If your company has nearly 50 people, however, and they all need to use the net at the same time, you may find that more is better.
Do your employees primarily use an intranet system? If so, you may not need much high-speed Internet service. On the other hand, Internet speed becomes dramatically more important when they are required to regularly download things like documents or videos.
Are you performing routine backups? If you are doing remote backups from every desk, which is advisable, you will need to be able to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize your backup data.
Are you using a service such as DropBox or Google drive to share files? After a file is saved, it goes to the cloud and then to someone else’s computer. You need to have sufficient bandwidth to support this function while also supporting every other service.
Your organization location may cause you to think about high-speed organization access to The web such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. They are commonly found in “lit buildings” in Bossier City, Louisiana that have already been wired by a carrier. The ease and affordability of adding high-speed Internet to your office may surprise you.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. Also, securing high-speed access to The net using gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet often takes less than 30 days, depending on its availability.
Does your business host its own servers to run information feeds, websites or application program interfaces (APIs) with companies or offices located outside of your four walls? Are your organization headquarters with a hosted application connected to fifty or more satellite offices? Perhaps you are in retail and host the point of sale (POS) system for thousands of stores? Do you run a law office that hosts the data for satellite offices in different cities or states?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. If your Internet connection goes down, those people are unable to work. Are you picking an intranet solution that provides reliability and stability for your multiple, simultaneous connections from various sites?
An inexpensive 10 Meg circuit may be enough if you have one office that needs to surf the web. A cable modem may also be adequate in this situation. It is advisable that high-speed Internet access be available at the central business office or headquarters, including gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuits. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would likely be insufficient.
Bringing in a less-expensive circuit like a cable modem often comes with a price. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple tenants. While you may subscribe to a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection, you may be unable to reach those speeds during peak hours. Cable operators are only permitted to establish a certain amount of bandwidth within communities. That bandwidth reaches out like branches to every building in the community and the people living and working in those buildings. The 30-meg speed you are capped out sounds good but it is possible that you will never reach that speed during business hours. Is it a problem if you get a quarter or even half of the speed you expected?
Some carriers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. In this case, your business receives full allocation of bandwidth. There is no sharing with any outsiders. The presence of numerous buildings and tenants should have no effect on your speed. You should receive full capacity of your circuits no matter what the time of day.
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. If you want to reach gigabit speeds from your organization out to the net, you can by using a gigabit Internet provider.
Providers in these situations deliver enough to cover everyone’s needs. The carriers divide their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing that everyone gets their contracted speed.
Despite outstanding Internet bandwidth products offered by providers in Bossier City, circuits do go down. What can you do to minimize the chance that you will experience an outage of some kind?
Consider redundant circuits.
There are, in reality, two kinds of redundancy.
The first type is when one single carrier provides you with multiple circuits. When there are problems with a physical line or a port or other failures, it can be helpful to have redundant circuits. It is possible for both circuits to go down. If your carrier has a regional problem like a widespread outage, or there is a broken line outside your building, even your redundant circuits may fail. While offering some protection, it is not without risk.
You can also achieve redundancy by utilizing different carriers to bring in and establish your circuits. 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. In reality, they are completely separate and redundant to each other. Diversity redundancy provides greater assurance, comfort and protection. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
To maximize the benefit of redundancy, consider looking for redundant circuits from different providers that have different pathway in Bossier City. This means that you should try to have the circuits come into you building from different sides. The circuits would attached to the proper outside source whether a subterranean conduit or a telephone pole. They would be set up in different directions and would lead to different data centers or main office spaces. If a major accident occurs or there is a fire that impedes the function of circuits in a particular region, you have redundancy in a different direction.
It is true that access to The Internet costs you money. However, the cost does not come close to what you will pay if the access that is not reliable. Think about the following situations:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. It is possible that during normal business hours, those tenants might be downloading large files or watching continuous videos. They might be getting a lot of phone calls. As the amount of available bandwidth diminishes, what happens to your phone calls? What happens to the quality of that phone call? Are calls lost or dropped? Will the calls be choppy?
Regardless of whether you are part of a legal practice and your firm does file sharing, or an accounting practice sharing databases, your office is the central point or hub of your business. Whether you have 2 places, 250, or 2000, they all rely on your primary Internet connection to retrieve data and information. What if your circuit fails? Would it cause mere annoyance or utter disaster? Can meaningful work be conducted at your remote offices? Can they process transactions or new orders? Circulate necessary data? Choosing the right solution depends largely on assessing and understanding the specific needs of your organization. Perhaps you are a software company, running a hosted solution used by hundreds of customers. Maybe you offer a service that allows other systems use an application program interface (API) to communicate with you to collect information and data. You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your business servers. Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?
What if your organization could not function at all without the net? Maybe your organization depends on it completely. What if your representatives can make no outgoing telephone calls because your circuits go down? No calls could be answered either. Basically, you are out of company. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Make sure your providers are as reliable as possible. Is the quality of service sufficient for your calls to be clear and reliable?
It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your organization needs and budgets will drive your decisions. In summary:
A single fifty, ten or five megabyte Internet access circuit may be sufficient to meet the needs of your small organization, particularly if you have only one location and are not worried about redundancy. You may find that if your building is “lit”, gigabit service and Metro Ethernet service may be reasonably cost-effective choices for you. Prices change based on your location and the availability of circuits. Please speak with our engineers about what options best suit your needs.
You have a mid-sized Bossier City company; higher speed access to The web required. Your choices include: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or other high-speed circuits. Optimally, multiple carriers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. Achieving this may not be as costly as you first thought. Using one 100-megabyte circuit instead of two 50-megabyte circuits, is one example. Do not forget that you will find variations in price and availability. Call one of our experts to learn what is available in your specific area.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. Redundant circuits are essential. Different providers are desirable. Additionally, you should consider redundant equipment (routers and switches) in your facility to minimize the risk of downtime. Take a careful look at Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers and gigabit Internet providers. Research other high-speed access to The Internet circuit providers also and make an informed decision. Your organization can benefit from finding the right mix of services and providers.
If you can place yourself in this category, it is essential that you have Metro Ethernet, point-to-point circuits and gigabit Internet circuits. You must have redundant circuits for multiple providers as well as redundant hardware in your office to ensure your uptime. You need to provide sufficient bandwidth to handle usage spikes without slowdowns or interruptions. Your goal is to have hardware and circuits that are more than capable of providing support to a significant number of fast and simultaneous connections.
Do not risk having failing circuits or not enough bandwidth. You need to have the right circuit or circuits to meet your demands while staying within your budget. The pressure involved in selecting the proper mix of hardware and circuits can be overwhelming.
We have engineers that will analyze your needs, look at your business requirements and develop an action plan for you… for free!We’ll examine your current usage and demand levels then create a design that provides you with the resources you need to keep your company running smoothly at a reasonable cost.
If you would like to arrange for an assessment, please click here to complete the contact information form to the right. You can call our office as well. It can take as little as 48 hours to provide a complete assessment.