Because of today’s environment, companies in East Providence depend on the net. Reliable access to the net is the lifeblood of their company. Fortune 500 companies to small companies and everything in between, count on reliable and fast Internet access.
We are going to become increasingly dependent on Internet access as the months and years progress.
From video conferencing to voice over IP, email to data sharing and data archiving to Internet commerce, the internet is everywhere you look. What is the right solution for your requirements? Maybe a cable modem is a sufficient solution. Is Metro Ethernet necessary? Would Gigabit Internet suffice? A 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point: what is right for your company in East Providence, Rhode Island?
The needs of your particular company must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Is the internet only used for web surfing and email? Is it used for real-time data connection with cloud servers? Are you hosting the data in East Providence, Rhode Island and distant places or offices rely on you?
What if there is an outage and your high-speed Internet is interrupted? How might the downtime cause problems for your business? Is the absence of uptime detrimental? You must answer these questions before you buy.
High-speed access to The web is required by all businesses. Before you choose your broadband, look at the costs and benefits. Performing this analysis is an important step in picking the right one for your business. Many service providers toss out terms such as:
… focus on what matters: what does your company need and what are the best services and solutions out there to meet those needs?
For most companies in East Providence, Rhode Island, some or all of the employees need access to the web. Whether it is for organization research, to order supplies or to use third-party applications, the internet is required.
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. You may need more if you have more workers and those workers all need to be on the internet during the same hours.
Your workforce may simply use an intranet system with limited video and graphics. If this is true, your need for high speed Internet be less than you thought. On the other hand, if your company requires that its employees download many documents or images and videos, Internet speed becomes more important.
Are you regularly performing backups? 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.
Do you use a file-sharing service? Perhaps you use Google drive, DropBox or a different service? When people save a file, it gets pushed to the cloud. The file is then synched with other people’s computers. Running all your services properly, including sharing files, requires that you have the right amount of bandwidth.
You may consider high-speed organization Internet access if you location warrants it. Gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet may be viable options for you. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in East Providence, Rhode Island. Providers have already wired these buildings. Choosing to add high-speed Internet to your office is a tough decision but it can be less expensive and easier than 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. 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.
Does your business host its own servers running websites, APIs or data feeds for other offices or companies outside of your own four walls? Do your headquarters have a hosted Internet application that must be accessed regularly by 40 or 50 branch offices? Are you a retail company with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? You may be a law firm hosting data for three or four different offices.
Access to data and programs by people outside of your main location becomes necessary when you host information centrally. For those people, no Internet connection means no work gets done. If you need multiple connections to function at the same time from many different places, make sure that your intranet solution can reliably support it.
An inexpensive 10 Meg circuit may be enough if you have one office that needs to surf the internet. A cable modem may also be adequate in this situation. For headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. While all offer high speeds, they also need to be capable of supporting multiple diverse connections. The support you need could not be provided by a cable modem.
Utilizing a cable modem or other less expensive circuit may seem like a good option but can result in unexpected cost. While the monthly rate is lower, the bandwidth is generally shared among other tenants. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper speeds during peak hours. Often, within a given community, cable companies may only deliver a particular amount of bandwidth. Buildings, offices and tenants within the buildings all must share that amount of bandwidth, whatever it may be. During crucial working hours, you may not get to the 30-meg speed you have been capped at. What will the consequences be if you expect 30 but only get half that? What if you get even less?
You can sign up for dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth from some carriers. In this scenario, the bandwidth is fully allocated to you and your company or organization. No one else uses it. 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.
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. Gigabit speeds from your office to the internet can be reached if you use a gigabit Internet provider.
In these cases, the providers 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 East Providence, Rhode Island even though some carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. Ask this question: “what can I do to decrease the likelihood of an outage?
Consider 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. When there are problems with a physical line or a port or other failures, it can be helpful to have redundant circuits. However, if that carrier has a regional outage or physical line damaged outside of your building, both circuits may go down. 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. These connections can be bound together so they act and appear to the public as a single circuit. Using particular routers and IP address allocations, no one would be able to tell that you have multiple providers or circuits. 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.
The carriers you choose for your redundant circuits should have different physical pathways in East Providence, Rhode Island. This is an important consideration when trying to obtain the most redundancy. If at all possible, you want to obtain circuits entering the premises 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.
While access to The Internet is not free, it pales in comparison with the cost of not having reliable Internet access. Consider the following:
Your business is on a cable modem and your carrier provides circuits to 20 other offices in your building. What if any or all of those tenants are huge call centers taking in a massive volume of phone calls, are organization that perform large file downloads or stream many videos? How will your telephone calls be affected as the amount of available bandwidth decreases? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Are calls lost or dropped? Will the calls be choppy?
Your office may be the working center of an entire organization enterprise. The kind of organization 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. All of your offices, whether you have 3 or 3, 000, rely on your primary Internet connection to successfully access data. What happens if your circuit goes down? Would you merely be annoyed? Would there be catastrophic consequences? Are remote offices able to work at all? Can they take or process any orders at all? Circulate essential files and data? Make sure you completely understand your needs before you pick a solution. Perhaps you have hundreds of clients or customers that use a hosted solution that your software company is running. Perhaps you operate a service where other systems talk to yours via an API to calculate freight prices, commodity prices, collect current weather data or receive any other information that you serve up. You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your business servers. If you have repeated outages, how long will they remain a customer?
Does your company completely rely on the web? Should your circuits stop working, imagine your people being unable to make any outbound phone calls. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. Your business is basically done with. While many of the most reputable call centers are already aware and using the advantages of redundancy, is it sufficiently meeting their needs? Are your carriers sufficiently reliable? Clear and reliable calls are essential. Does your carrier service consistently provide this?
You clearly have many options. Your choices will largely count on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your organization. To summarize:
A single fifty, ten or five megabyte access to The net circuit may be adequate to meet the needs of your small company, particularly if you have only one location and are not worried about redundancy. Metro Ethernet service or gigabit service may also be a reasonably priced option if you are in a lit building. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.
You have a midsized company in East Providence, Rhode Island; you will surely need higher-speed Internet. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Ideally, you want to have the greatest redundancy. You can achieve this by using multiple circuits from different providers. Achieving this may cost extra but it won’t double your costs. Two 50-megabyte circuits may be more cost effective than a single 100 circuit. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. 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.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of organization or offices. They require redundant circuits. Multiple providers are highly desirable. Additionally, you should consider redundant equipment (routers and switches) in your facility to minimize the risk of downtime. 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 organization can benefit from finding the right mix of services and carriers.
Gigabit Internet circuits, point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits are essential and Metro Ethernet Internet circuits must be utilized by companies in any of these categories. In order to maximize and protect your uptime, you must have redundancy. You should have redundant circuits from multiple providers in addition to redundant hardware. 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.
The danger and risk of failing circuits is tremendous. So is the risk of having less bandwidth than you need. You need to have the right circuit or circuits to meet your demands while staying within your budget. There is tremendous pressure on you to choose the best combination of circuits and hardware.
Our expert engineers will review your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. We’ll examine your current usage and demand levels then create a design that provides you with the resources you need to keep your business 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.