Obtaining High-Speed Internet Access in Decatur

Decatur, Alabama High Speed Access to the World Wide Web: Accessing Metro Ethernet, Business Broadband Internet and Gigabit Internet

Today’s environment demands that companies in Decatur 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 dependent on Internet access as the months and years progress.

The net has a significant presence in our lives. From email to information sharing, data archiving to e-commerce, and VOIP to video conferencing, the web is certainly ubiquitous. What is the best fix to meet your needs? Perhaps a cable modem is all you need. Is Metro Ethernet necessary? You may need Gigabit Internet. Will your Decatur, Alabama company needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg Internet access or 100 Meg access to The net point?

Access to the internet: Determining Your Business’s Needs

Before choosing an adequate or appropriate service, you must decide what your business really needs. Is the internet only used for web surfing and email? Is it used for real-time data connection with cloud servers? You may be hosting the data in Decatur and remote places rely on this.

How would an outage to your high-speed Internet affect your company? Can your business afford the downtime? Is uptime essential to the success of your organization? Ask yourself these questions before making any purchases. The answers will help you determine what is right for you.

Analyzing Assorted High-Speed Internet Solutions in Decatur

High-speed access to the internet is something all companies need. When choosing the right broadband internet for company, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. You will hear providers use terms like:

• Fast access to The net is for you!
• Business Internet / Internet for business
• Broadband cable modems are our specialty
• Provider of Metro Ethernet
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Multiprotocol label switching, also known as MPLS
• Providers of point-to-point circuits
• 5 Meg Internet access
• Internet access circuits-10 Meg
• We provide access to The web circuits-50 Meg
• 100 Meg access to The net circuits
• Sip trunking providers
• Internet access dedicated to you and only you
• … and so many more

… be sure not to forget what capability and technical solutions meet your business’s specific needs.

Business Access: Surfing the net at Work

At most businesses including those in Decatur, some or all employees need access to The net. It may be needed for organization research, to order office supplies or other reasons.

The solution you choose may be based on the number of employees you have or expect to have. A 5 or 10 megabyte Internet circuit may be perfect if you only have a few employees. If you have more than that, you may need more.

You may not need as much high-speed Internet access if your employees work primarily on an intranet system with limited graphics and video. When employees are often downloading images, videos and documents, however, the need for speed increases significantly.

Do you routinely backup? 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.

Are you using Google drive, DropBox or another file sharing service? The saved files go to the cloud and are then synchronized or “shared” with other people’s computers. You need to have sufficient bandwidth to support this function while also supporting every other service.

High-speed business access to The Internet like Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options for you depending on your location. They are usually contained in “lit buildings” in Decatur, Alabama that have already been wired by a carrier. You may be surprised by how easy and affordable it is to add high-speed Internet to your company.

Introducing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be expensive. Bringing a connection to a suite within the building is not. Did you know that obtaining high-speed Internet access with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet can often take 30 days or less? Of course, this depends upon availability.

High-Speed Internet access Required for Hosting Applications

Do you have your own organization servers that run APIs, websites or feeds for offsite offices or companies? Are your company headquarters with a hosted application accessed by 50 branch offices? Is your organization retail? Do you have thousands of stores? Do you host the point of sale system for the entire chain? Do you run a law office that hosts the data for satellite offices in different cities or states?

If your company hosts its programs and information at a central location, people outside of that location need to have access in order to conduct business. 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.

A cost friendly 10 Meg circuit or even a cable modem may satisfy the needs of a company with a single office that needs to surf the web. For headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would not be able to accomplish this.

Cable Circuit Sharing in Decatur Versus Dedicated Bandwidth: What is Right For You?

In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple tenants. The cable modem you subscribe to with the 30 Meg connections may not always reach those speeds, especially during the busiest or “peak” hours of the workday. Many cable operators can only deliver a certain amount of bandwidth in a community. The bandwidth branches off to the multiple buildings, offices and tenants within them. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?

Some carriers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. If you want your very own bandwidth that is not used by anyone else, you should consider this. 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. Want to reach gigabit speeds? You can by using a gigabit Internet provider.

The providers in this situation deliver high-speed to a particular building in sufficient quantity to split their circuit among various tenants. Of course, they must ensure that they each get the specific amount of their contracted speed.

Incorporating Redundancy Into Your High Speed Business Internet Circuits in Decatur, Alabama

The truth is that circuits can go down in Decatur, Alabama even though some carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?

You may be a candidate for redundant circuits.

Redundancy basically comes in two forms.

With the first type of redundancy, you receive multiple circuits from the same carrier. This provides some protection when there are certain failures. Multiple circuits can help for example, when there is a physical line issue or a problem with a router port. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. While there is some security in this, you are still vulnerable under some circumstances.

Bringing in circuits using two distinct carriers is the second form of circuit redundancy. 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. In reality, they are completely separate and redundant to each other. This is called diversity redundancy and offers more protection that the first. If one carrier has a problem, the other likely will not.

You want maximum redundancy. In order to achieve this, look for redundant circuits from different providers with different physical geographic pathways in Decatur. In other words, try to obtain circuits entering the building from different sides of the building. Ideally, the circuits will be going in different directions and toward various central company spaces or data centers. 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.

Not Having Adequate Protection for your High-Speed access to The Internet: What is the Cost to Your Business?

While Internet access is not free, it pales in comparison with the cost of not having reliable access to The net. Think about the following situations:

Your business relies on VoIP for its telephone service

Your office uses a cable modem and, in addition to you, the carrier provides 10-15 additional tenants with circuits. Any of these tenants may be taking many calls, conducting huge downloads or streaming video during your regular office hours. As the amount of available bandwidth diminishes, what will happen to your phone calls? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Maybe calls will randomly drop? Inaudible (choppy) to your customers?

Multiple sites use your business as the central data point

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 company. Your primary Internet connection is responsible for granting access to data to all of your places. This is true whether you have 3 places or 2000 sites. What if your circuit fails? Would you merely be annoyed? Would there be catastrophic consequences? How much work, if any, can be done by your remote locations? Take new orders? Service existing ones? Disseminate needed information and data? Choosing the right solution depends largely on assessing and understanding the specific needs of your business. Maybe you are a corporation that designs and sells software and you run a hosted solution that is used by hundreds and hundreds of customers. Do you operate a service where other systems speak with yours by using an application program interface (API)? For example do other systems gain access to yours in order to calculate prices, prices, or to collect information that you serve up? 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?

You are call center dependent on VoIP

Is the internet integral to the proper function of your business? Do you rely on it entirely? If your circuits go down, you cannot make calls. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. You are now officially out of company. Is redundancy enough? Are the providers that you are using reliable enough? Are you getting quality service so that your calls are clear and consistent?

Considering the Best Decatur High-Speed Business Access Circuits for Your Company

You clearly have many options. Your budget, as well as the needs of your company, will help drive your decisions. To recap:

Internet Access Needs for Small Company

If you are a small business, with one location and you do not worry about redundancy, one five meg, ten meg, or fifty meg access to The Internet circuit may very well be enough to meet your needs. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Costs vary with location and the availability of circuits so speak with our engineers. Together, we can find the best option for you and your organization.

Medium Sized Company in One Location: Access to the Internet

Having a medium or mid-sized company in Decatur, Alabama requires that you have higher-speed access to the internet. Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet and other higher speed Internet circuits are options to consider. Multiple circuits utilizing multiple providers would, ideally, provide you with maximum redundancy. But can you do this without doubling costs? Sometimes, yes. For example, you may use 2 fifty meg circuits instead of 1 one hundred meg circuit. Again, costs and availability vary. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.

Internet Access and Your Mid-Sized Business: What You Needs

What companies have the highest risk for failure; those with multiple sites. They require redundant circuits. Different providers are desirable. In addition, consider redundant equipment. Redundant routers and switches can minimize risk also. As always, take a careful look and choose the right Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed Internet access circuit providers. Your company can benefit from finding the right mix of services and carriers.

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

If you fall into this group, you must have Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet circuits and point-to-point High-speed Internet circuits. You will want to have the greatest protection of your uptime. To accomplish this you must have redundancy: redundant circuits from multiple providers and redundant hardware for your system. You must have the bandwidth to withstand sharp increases in usage. Doing so will help protect you from slowdowns or interruptions. Be sure to have the right circuits and hardware. They both must be able to support multiple, fast, concurrent connections.

Internet Need Demand Analysis Provided Free of Charge

Do you understand how great the risk of failing circuits and insufficient bandwidth really is? Your demand and budget constraints should both be considered when you decide what circuit or combination of circuits you must have. The pressure involved in selecting the proper mix of hardware and circuits can be overwhelming.

Our engineers will take the pressure off and develop a free action plan for you by analyzing your needs. After reviewing your current usage and demand levels, we will generate a cost effective plan that provides your company with the resources it needs.

Please complete the contact form by clicking here. You may also call our office to set up an appointment for your assessment. Your assessment may be finished within as little as 48 hours.