Reliable Internet access is the lifeblood of Fayetteville companies and their company. The company functions of all companies, from Fortune 500 to small companies, depend on fast and reliable Internet access.
Our dependence on access to The web will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
The use of the web is pervasive. We use it for email and data sharing, video conferencing and VOIP, archiving and commerce. What is the best fix to meet your requirements? Will a cable modem be adequate? Maybe you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet may be required. Your Fayetteville company probably needs a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg access to The net point but which one is best?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your business, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Is Internet use limited to website surfing or emailing only? Is real time data connection with cloud servers important to your company? There may be remote sites that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Fayetteville.
What if there is an outage and your high-speed Internet is interrupted? What about the downtime that results? Can your organization afford that? Is your success dependent on uptime? These types of questions must be answered before you make purchase anything.
In all-encompassing terms, businesses need high-speed Internet access. An analysis of the costs and benefits should be done prior to choosing the broadband internet that is correct for your organization. You will hear providers use terms like:
… be sure not to forget what capability and technical solutions meet your business’s specific needs.
At any company in Fayetteville some employees, if not all employees, need some type of access to the web if they are to properly perform their job duties. access to The Internet may be needed to conduct research, use third-party applications or to order supplies.
The number of workers you employ, may be the most important factor in your decision making process. A five or ten megabyte Internet circuit may be all you need if employ a small workforce. If your organization has nearly 50 people, however, and they all need to use the web at the same time, you may find that more is better.
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, Internet speed becomes dramatically more important when they are required to regularly download things like documents or videos.
Do you perform backups at your company? It is recommended that you do remote backups from every desk. If you are, you will need to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize the backup data to collect.
Does your company require employees to share files using a service like Google drive or DropBox? As people save files, those files are pushed to the cloud and then synchronized back to other people’s computers. You must have sufficient bandwidth if you are to successfully support every service including file sharing.
Depending on your location, high-speed company access to The Internet, including Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in Fayetteville. Providers have already wired these buildings. Installing high-speed Internet may not be as difficult and expensive as 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. In fact, in as little as 30 days, you may be able to obtain high-speed access to the web with either gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. It depends upon availability.
Does your company host its own servers to run information feeds, websites or application program interfaces (APIs) with companies or offices located outside of your four walls? Is your main organization office with a hosted application accessed by 40 or even 50 branch office sites? Is your business retail? Do you have thousands of stores? Do you host the point of sale system for the entire chain? Are you a law firm hosting data for multiple office sites?
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. 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 sites, make sure that your intranet solution can reliably support it.
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. For the headquarters, high-speed access to The Internet including Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable. All offer quick speed but they must also be able to support diverse and multiple connections. A cable modem would likely not provide the necessary support.
In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. You may save money on your monthly bill but the bandwidth you get must be shared among many people. If you subscribe to a cable modem with a 30-megabyte connection, you would expect to always be able to reach that high speed. However, it is possible that during peak hours, you won’t. Cable operators are only permitted to establish a certain amount of bandwidth within communities. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. While you may be capped at thirty-megabyte speed, will you ever reach that speed during organization hours? Will there be trouble if your expectation is set at 30 but you only get 8 or 10?
You can sign up for dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth from some providers. If you want your very own bandwidth that is not used by anyone else, you should consider this. 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. Want to reach gigabit speeds? You can by using a gigabit Internet provider.
Carriers 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.
Realistically, while some providers in Fayetteville, North Carolina offer excellent Internet bandwidth products, it is possible for a circuit to go down. In what way can you diminish the risk of an outage?
Consider redundant circuits.
There are, in essence, two types of redundancy.
A single carrier, providing multiple circuits, to one customer, characterizes one form of redundancy. Redundant circuits help protect you from certain failures including physical line issues, port issues within routers, and others. However, if that carrier has a greater outage to your entire region or there is a line damaged outside of your office building, you may have both or all circuits go down. This is not foolproof, but does offer some protection.
In the second type of redundancy, you bring in circuits from two different 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. You know the truth: that they are individual circuits and are there to back each other up in case one goes down. While circuit redundancy in general is a good idea, diversity redundancy by using different providers, offers far better protection. If one carrier has a problem, the other likely will not.
If you want to maximize redundancy in Fayetteville please consider the following question: Do the carriers I am considering use the same physical geographic pathways? If at all possible, you want to obtain circuits entering the premises on different sides. The circuits would be attached underground or to telephone poles, in various directions. The circuits would go to different data centers or central offices. 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.
While access to The web is not free, it pales in comparison with the cost of not having reliable Internet access. Contemplate these situations:
The carrier you use for your cable modem also provides circuits for a dozen or more tenants in the office building. During business hours, any of those tenants could be streaming video, performing massive file downloads, processing large volumes of phone calls and more. As the amount of accessible bandwidth decreases, what will happen to your needs? What will happen to your phone calls? How will the caliber of the call be affected? Will you lose calls? Will your voice be inaudible? Will you have difficulty hearing the other end?
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. Your circuit goes down, now what happens? Would it annoy you or destroy you? Is work even possible at your other locations? Process or take new orders? Dispense and receive data? Do you know what your organization needs? Be sure to fully understand your requirements. It will help you choose the correct 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 prices, prices, or to collect information that you serve up? What if other systems can’t connect to your office servers? If you have repeated outages, how long will they remain a customer?
Your business is completely dependent on the internet. 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 done. Even for the most reputable call centers that already know of and use redundancy, is it sufficient? Are the providers that you are using reliable enough? Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
Obviously, there are a variety of choices. Your choices will largely depend on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your organization. To summarize:
If your business is small, with one location or office, you are likely not concerned about redundancy. For you, a single 5, 10 or 50 megabyte access to The net circuit may suffice. Is your building lit? If so, find out about gigabit or Metro Ethernet services. They may be reasonably priced options. Speak with our engineers about what is right for you. Prices vary with location and circuit availability.
If you have a midsized company in Fayetteville, you will need higher-speed Internet access. Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet and other higher speed Internet circuits are options to consider. Ideally, multiple circuits from multiple providers will provide you with the greatest redundancy. You can sometimes achieve this without doubling costs. For example, choosing two 50 meg circuits versus one 100 meg circuit. As a reminder; availability and costs may vary. 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. Redundant circuits must be an essential part of their systems. Multiple providers or providers are recommended. Also, redundant equipment such as switches and routers in your facility can minimize the risk of downtime. Have you looked at Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed Internet access circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. The correct combination of providers and services can keep your company running smoothly and efficiently.
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. You need to provide sufficient bandwidth to handle usage spikes without slowdowns or interruptions. Both your hardware and circuits must be capable of supporting a vast number of simultaneous and fast connections.
The risk of insufficient bandwidth or failing circuits is tremendous. 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.
We have engineers that will analyze your needs, look at your organization requirements and develop an action plan for you… for free!You want your business to run smoothly. We will look at your current usage levels and demand levels and design a plan that meets your needs at a cost that makes sense for you.
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.