These days, companies in College Station count on reliable access to The net as the lifeblood of their organization. All companies, big and small, need fast and reliable access to The net.
In the months and years ahead, people and businesses will become more reliant on access to the internet.
From video chat to voice over IP, email to data sharing and data archiving to Internet commerce, the web is everywhere you look. What is the best fix for your needs? Is a cable modem sufficient? Metro Ethernet may be the thing you need. Your needs may be met with Gigabit Internet. What does your College Station, Texas company need? Does it require 10 Meg Internet access, a 100 Meg access to The web point, a 50 Meg circuit or a 5 Meg circuit?
The needs of your particular company must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Is the web primarily used for emailing or web surfing? Is it used for real-time data connection with cloud servers? Are you hosting the data in College Station that remote locations rely upon?
What happens if you have an outage in your high-speed Internet? Will your business suffer from the lull? Is uptime required? Before you buy anything, you must answer these questions.
Speaking broadly, all companies need high-speed access to the internet. You need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits to your company before choosing the right broadband. While many service providers throw around terminologies such as:
… do not stray from the real issues. Focus on what your company’s needs are and what capabilities and technical solutions will help satisfy them.
Companies in College Station, Texas need access to the net for their employees. Some companies may need it only for a few people and others may need it for the entire workforce. It may be needed for company research, to order office supplies or other reasons.
The best solution may rely on how many employees you have. A smaller Internet circuit may be enough if you only have a handful of workers. Perhaps a 5 or 10 megabyte is all you need. You may need more if you have more workers and those workers all need to be on the web during the same hours.
Do your employees primarily use an intranet system? If so, you may not need much high-speed Internet service. However, employees who must often download documents, images and videos, need that speed.
Do you backup information? 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 require employees to share files using a service like Google drive or DropBox? As a file is saved, it is pushed to the cloud and then synced back to other people’s computers. Supporting file sharing, while supporting every other service, requires sufficient bandwidth.
Depending on where you are, you may want to look into high-speed organization access to The Internet such as Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in College Station, Texas. Providers have already wired these buildings. 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. Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet may provide you with high-speed Internet access in thirty days or less, depending on availability.
Consider whether your company hosts its own servers that run APIs, websites and/or data to outside buildings, offices or companies. Is your main company office with a hosted application accessed by 40 or even 50 branch office sites? Are you hosting the point of sale (POS) system for 15, 000 retail chain stores? Are you a legal practice hosting the data for three locations?
When data, programs, or information is hosted centrally, those outside your office must gain access. Those people are not able to do their work if the internet connection fails or is unreliable. Make sure that when you choose your intranet solution it is reliable enough to support your need for multiple and simultaneous connections for many different places.
An inexpensive 10 Meg circuit may be enough if you have one office that needs to surf the net. A cable modem may also be sufficient in this situation. It is advisable that high-speed access to The net be available at the central organization office or headquarters, including gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuits. High speed is important but they also must be able to support multiple distinct connections. A cable modem would probably not be enough.
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. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper 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. While you may be capped at a 30 Meg speed, you may never be able to reach that speed during company hours. What will the consequences be if you expect 30 but only get half that? What if you get even less?
Some providers offer customers dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your business. Notwithstanding the existence of tenants, offices or buildings in the area, you should have the full capability of your circuits at all times.
You can receive guaranteed bandwidth with Metro Ethernet. You can receive it in increments of five, 10, 50 or one hundred megabyte circuits. Gigabit Internet providers offer gigabit speeds from your office to the web.
Here, carriers deliver enough high-speed to the building, so that it can be split among various tenants. The carrier has the right amount so that everyone gets the contracted speed that has been promised.
Circuits can go down in College Station even though certain carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. You must ask yourself: “how do I lessen the chance of an outage? ”
You may be a candidate for redundant circuits.
Essentially, there are two different ways to look at redundancy.
The first type is when one single carrier provides you with multiple circuits. If there is a problem with a line or a port in your router, circuit redundancy can offer some protection. Damage to an external wire or part can cause the failure of all of your circuits. A regional outage experienced by your carrier can have the same result. While there is some security in this, you are still vulnerable under some circumstances.
Circuit redundancy can also be achieved in the following way: Import circuits using two different and distinct providers. 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. However, despite appearances, they are actually very much separate and are redundant to each other. This redundancy, referred to as diversity redundancy, offers much greater protection. When one carrier has a problem like an outage or some other failure, you have another one that works.
The carriers you choose for your redundant circuits should have different physical pathways in College Station. This is an important consideration when trying to obtain the most redundancy. Basically this means that you want your circuits to enter your building on different sides or paths. Whether they are attached underground or to a telephone pole, your goal should be to have the circuits in different directions leading to different central sites. If you can accomplish this, you are protected from a major catastrophe. For example, if a there is a fire or some other accident that negatively affects circuits in a region, you have redundancy in a physically different direction.
Internet access costs money but the cost of NOT having reliable Internet access is greater. Contemplate these situations:
Is your company on a cable modem? How many other tenants is your carrier servicing in your building? Are 14 other offices getting circuits? It is possible that during normal organization hours, those tenants might be downloading large files or watching continuous videos. They might be getting a lot of phone calls. What will happen to your telephone calls as the amount of usable bandwidth decreases? What about phone call quality? Are the calls going to be dropped? Inaudible (choppy) to your customers?
Your office may be the working center of an entire company enterprise. The kind of company 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. Every single one of your offices, stores and locations rely on you and your primary Internet connection to retrieve data. If your circuit goes done, what will happen next? Is it a mere annoyance or a catastrophic failure? How much work, if any, can be done by your remote places? What will happen to new orders? Can they be taken or processed? Disseminate needed information and data? Be sure you understand your requirements fully before choosing a solution. Perhaps you are a software company, running a hosted solution used by hundreds of customers. You may operate a service like this: other systems communicate with yours via an API to figure out freight rates, stock prices, to compile weather data or receive any other information that you provide. What if other systems can’t connect to your office servers? Customers do not enjoy repeated outages. How long with they put up with them before looking to take their company elsewhere?
Maybe your business depends entirely on the internet. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. You are essentially out of business. While most reputable call centers are already aware and using redundancy, is it enough? Can you truly rely on your providers? Are they as dependable as they claim? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?
You clearly have several choices. Your choices will largely depend on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your company. As a high-level summary:
You are probably not thinking about redundancy if you have a small business with a single location. In this case, you can probably get by with a single access to The web circuit of 5, 10 or 50 meg. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Because prices can vary based on the location of your business and the availability of circuits, speak with our engineers to learn your options.
Having a medium or mid-sized company in College Station requires that you have higher-speed access to the web. Your choices include: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or other high-speed circuits. In a perfect world, you will achieve maximum redundancy by utilizing multiple providers to provide and service different circuits. But can you do this without doubling costs? Sometimes, yes. Two 50-megabyte circuits may be more cost effective than a single 100 circuit. Do not forget that you will find variations in price and availability. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of business or offices. Redundancy is extremely vital to them. Multiple providers are highly desirable. You can increase redundancy with switches or routers. Having redundant equipment can also minimize risk. Take a careful look at Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers and gigabit Internet providers. Research other high-speed Internet access circuit providers also and make an informed decision. The right mix can help. If you can figure out the best combination of carriers and services for your company, you will benefit.
If you fall into this group, you must have Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet circuits and point-to-point High-speed Internet circuits. You must have redundant circuits for multiple providers as well as redundant hardware in your office to ensure your uptime. You need enough bandwidth. The bandwidth must be adequate to handle spikes in usage with no slowdowns or interruptions. Be sure to have the right circuits and hardware. They both must be able to support multiple, fast, concurrent connections.
Your business faces great risk of less than adequate bandwidth and failing circuits. 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 engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. Our experts will examine your current usage and demand. We are going to then generate a design that gives you the resources you need while keeping your business 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. We do assessments quickly. It can take as little as 48 hours to complete your analysis.