In today’s environment, companies in Delray Beach rely on reliable Internet access as the lifeblood of their business. All companies count on reliable and quick access to The Internet. This is true no matter how large or small the company.
Internet access will become increasingly vital to us in the coming months and years. Our dependence on access to The Internet will only grow as time goes on.
Our uses of the net reach far and wide. From data sharing, video calls, and shopping to VOIP and email, the net has a broad presence. What is the best fix to meet your needs? Can a cable modem suffice? Is Metro Ethernet necessary? Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. Does your Delray Beach company need a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg access to The web, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg access to The net point?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your organization, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Is the web primarily used for emailing or web surfing? Will Internet usage mainly involve cloud servers and real time data connection? Perhaps you, in Delray Beach, are hosting the data and remote places rely on this.
What if there is an outage and your high-speed Internet is interrupted? What about the downtime that results? Can your company afford that? Is uptime required? Ask yourself these questions before making any purchases. The answers will help you determine what is right for you.
In all-encompassing terms, businesses need high-speed Internet access. When choosing the right broadband for business, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. While various providers will throw around terminology like:
… 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 Delray Beach need access to the web for their employees. Some companies may need it only for a few people and others may need it for the entire workforce. access to The Internet may be needed to conduct research, use third-party applications or to order supplies.
The solution you choose may be based on the number of employees you have or expect to have. An Internet circuit of 5 -10 megabytes might be enough for your organization if you only have a few people working for you. If you have more than that, you may need more.
Do your employees primarily use an intranet system? If so, you may not need much high-speed Internet service. If your business functions demand the downloading of documents and images or videos on a regular basis, speed becomes a must more important issue.
Do you routinely backup? When you do remote backups from every workstation, which you should, you must support multiple and simultaneous connections to the web in order to sync your backup data.
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.
Your organization location may cause you to think about high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. They are usually contained in “lit buildings” in Delray Beach that have already been wired by a carrier. Choosing to add high-speed Internet to your office is a tough decision but it can be less expensive and easier than you think.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. You can actually get high-speed access with gigabit Internet or even Metro Ethernet quickly. It often takes only 30 days or less, depending on availability.
Do you have your own organization servers that run APIs, websites or feeds for offsite offices or companies? Do fifty or so branch offices need access to a hosted application at your company headquarters? Does your office host the point of sale (POS) system for every single store in a large retail chain? Are you a law firm hosting data for multiple office sites?
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 net connection fails or is unreliable. Is the intranet solution you are choosing sufficiently reliable? Is it stable enough to support simultaneous connections from different places?
The needs of an office with one employee web surfing may not need more than a cable modem or an inexpensive 5-10 megabyte circuit. High-speed access to The Internet is advisable for the headquarters. Gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuit is recommended. All offer quick speed but they must also be able to support diverse and multiple connections. A cable modem would not be able to accomplish this.
Bringing in a cable modem, which seems to save money, may actually come at a price. Even though you pay less money per month you must consider that the bandwidth you receive may be shared and used by multiple parties in the building. During peak use hours, you may not be able to reach proper speeds. Cable operators differ but many have prescribed limits on the bandwidth amount that they can deliver within a set community. The bandwidth branches off to the multiple buildings, offices and tenants within them. While you may be capped at a 30 Meg speed, you may never be able to reach that speed during organization hours. Is it a problem if you get a quarter or even half of the speed you expected?
You can find a carrier who can provide dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your company. Regardless of neighbors, or other tenants, you should have the full capacity of your circuit 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.
In these cases, the carriers 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.
The truth is that circuits can go down in Delray Beach, Florida even though some carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. How can you lower the chances that you will experience some kind of outage?
You may be a candidate for redundant circuits.
There are, in reality, two kinds of redundancy.
The first is where you get multiple circuits from one carrier. Redundant circuits help protect you from certain failures including physical line issues, port issues within routers, and others. If your carrier experiences a regional outage or you have a line broken outside of your building, you may lose the use of all of your circuits. This is not foolproof, but does offer some protection.
Utilizing circuits from two different carriers is the second kind of redundancy. For users and the public, you can make it look like you have one cohesive circuit. You can also make the connections act as a single circuit. You can do this with various advanced routers and IP address allocations. 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. In the event a carrier goes down, you will not have to worry. You will have a perfectly live carrier there to keep things moving.
When considering redundant circuits and providers, try to be sure that the carriers you look at in Delray Beach 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. 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.
Even though access to The web comes with a cost, you will save money if you make sure it is dependable. Unreliable access will end up costing you more in the long run. Contemplate these scenarios:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. During business hours, any of those tenants could be streaming video, performing massive file downloads, processing large volumes of phone calls and more. How will your telephone calls be affected as the amount of available bandwidth decreases? What happens to the quality of that phone call? Are calls lost or dropped? Will they be full of static?
Whether you are a law firm doing file sharing, an accounting practice sharing databases or a retailer operating a distributed point-of-sale system, your office is the hub for your enterprise. Your primary Internet connection is responsible for granting access to data to all of your locations. This is true whether you have 3 locations or 2000 sites. If your circuit goes done, what happens next? Is it a mere annoyance or a catastrophic failure? Can your satellite or remote office do any work at all? What about new orders? Circulate necessary data? Be sure you understand your requirements fully before choosing a solution. 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 communicate with yours by using an application program interface (API)? For example do other systems gain access to yours in order to calculate rates, prices, or to collect information that you serve up? You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your company servers. If you have repeated outages, how long will they remain a customer?
Your business is 100% reliant on the web to properly function. If your circuits go down, you cannot make calls. Calls coming in would be unanswerable. You might not even know people are trying to reach your office. Basically, you are out of organization. Is redundancy enough? Can you truly rely on your carriers? Are they as dependable as they claim? Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
You clearly have several choices. Your budget, as well as the needs of your company, will help drive your decisions. In review:
If you have one location or office and do not feel the need to consider redundancy for your system, a smaller Internet access circuit may be all you need. A single fifty, ten or five megabyte circuit might be enough. Find out if you are in a lit building. If so, the price of Metro Ethernet or gigabit service may be affordable. Speak with our engineers about what is right for you. Prices vary with location and circuit availability.
Mid sized companies with a single office in Delray Beach, Florida, need higher speed access to The net. Your choices include: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or other high-speed circuits. Ideally, multiple circuits from multiple providers will provide you with the greatest redundancy. It is sometimes possible to reach this without adding ridiculous costs. For example, choosing two 50 meg circuits versus one 100 meg circuit. Do not forget that you will find variations in price and availability. Your specific location will determine what options you have. Please speak with one of our experts to find out what those are and how we can meet your needs.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. They need redundant circuits. Different carriers are desirable. Redundant routers, switches and other equipment can also be helpful to lessen downtime during a problem. 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. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your business run 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 will want to have the greatest protection of your uptime. To accomplish this you must have redundancy: redundant circuits from multiple carriers and redundant hardware for your system. Spikes or sudden increase in usage can result in Internet slowdowns or disruptions in service. You can decrease the risk of these events by having sufficient bandwidth. Having both your hardware and your circuits capable of supporting many different, fast, and simultaneous connections is essential. It cannot be one or the other.
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.
Our engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. We are going to 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.
Please call our office for an assessment appointment or click here to complete the contact form on the right side of the page. It can take as little as 48 hours to provide a complete assessment.