Obtaining High-Speed Access To The Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Accessing High Speed Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Florida: Gigabit Internet, Organization Broadband and Metro Ethernet Access

Reliable Internet access is the lifeblood of Fort Lauderdale, Florida companies and their business. Fast and reliable Internet access is needed for companies to function properly; large corporations and small companies alike.

Our dependence on Internet access will continue to grow in the coming months and years.

From email to data sharing, video chat to VoIP, and data archiving to Internet commerce, the web is ubiquitous. What is the best fix for your needs? Will a cable modem be adequate? Metro Ethernet may be the thing you need. Your needs may be met with Gigabit Internet. Will your Fort Lauderdale organization needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg access to The net or 100 Meg access to The web point?

Internet Access: Defining the Business Need

Before choosing an adequate or appropriate service, you must decide what your business really needs. Is the web only used for web surfing and email? Will Internet usage mainly involve cloud servers and real time data connection? Do remote sites depend on you hosting the data in Fort Lauderdale?

Have you thought about what will happen to your company if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? How will the downtime affect your company? How much uptime is essential to your company? Prior to making any purchases, you must determine the answers to these questions.

Analyzing Assorted High-Speed Internet Solutions in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Speaking broadly, all companies need high-speed access to the internet. Choosing the correct broadband for your company requires a cost benefit analysis. Don’t be distracted by terminology. While you may hear providers throw out words and phrases like:

• Fastest Internet access
• Business Internet service provider
• We provide broadband cable modems
• Metro Ethernet service
• GbE services or Gigabit Internet
• MPLS network
• point-to-point circuits
• five Meg Internet access circuits
• We provide 10 Meg access to The web circuits
• 50 Meg Internet access circuits
• Internet access circuits- One hundred megabytes
• Session Initiation Protocol/ Sip trunk
• Direct or dedicated Internet access
• … plus others

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

Business Internet access for Web Surfing

Workers for most companies in Fort Lauderdale have some need to access the internet during the course of their job. Internet access may be needed to conduct research, use third-party applications or to order supplies.

Perhaps the size of your work force may determine the solution that best fits your needs. 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. If you have many employees who need to use the web at the same time, you may do better with more.

If your employees are merely accessing an intranet system with limited graphics and video, your need for high-speed Internet may be reduced. However, employees who must often download documents, images and videos, need that speed.

Do you perform backups at your company? Synchronizing your backup data after doing remote backups from every desk requires you to support simultaneous connections out to the web.

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. Running all your services properly, including sharing files, requires that you have the right amount of bandwidth.

Are you interested in high-speed business Internet? Depending on where you are located, you may want to look into the viability of gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet. They are commonly found in “lit buildings” in Fort Lauderdale that have already been wired by a carrier. If you’d like to install high-speed Internet in your office, you should know that it might be more affordable than you realize.

Introducing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be expensive. Bringing a 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.

Web Applications: They Require High-Speed Internet Access

Does your organization host its own servers running websites, APIs or data feeds for other offices or companies outside of your own four walls? Is your main business office with a hosted application accessed by 40 or even 50 branch office sites? Are you a retail chain hosting the POS system for 12, 000 stores? Do you run a law office that hosts the data for satellite offices in different cities or states?

Access to data and programs by people outside of your main location becomes necessary when you host information centrally. Those people are not able to work without a solid Internet connection. Is the intranet solution you are choosing sufficiently reliable? Is it stable enough to support simultaneous connections from different places?

A cable modem or fairly cheap 10-megabyte circuit may be enough in certain scenarios. For example, these may meet the needs of a single office surfing the web. It is advisable that high-speed Internet access be available at the central business office or headquarters, including gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuits. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. Do you think a cable modem is sufficient? It is probably not.

Dedicated Bandwidth Versus Fort Lauderdale Shared Cable Circuits

Bringing in a less-expensive circuit like a cable modem often comes with a price. You may save money on your monthly bill but the bandwidth you get must be shared among many people. While you may subscribe to a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection, you may be unable to reach those speeds during peak hours. Many cable operators can only deliver a certain amount of bandwidth in a community. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. While you may be capped at a 30 Meg speed, you may never be able to reach that speed during business hours. Is this a problem for you if you expect 30 and get 6?

Some providers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your business. You should receive full capacity of your circuits during all hours. This is true even though you may have many buildings, businesses and tenants nearby.

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. If you want to reach gigabit speeds from your organization out to the internet, you can by using a gigabit Internet provider.

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.

Backup With Fort Lauderdale, Florida High Speed Business Internet Circuits

Despite outstanding Internet bandwidth products offered by carriers in Fort Lauderdale, circuits do go down. What can you do to minimize the chance that you will experience an outage of some kind?

Redundant circuits.

Redundancy basically comes in two forms.

The first is where you get multiple circuits from one 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. You get some protection, but also some risk.

The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from different carriers. If you think it is beneficial, you can bind the connections together in a manner that makes your circuits act and look like a single source. You know the truth: that they are individual circuits and are there to back each other up in case one goes down. Diversity redundancy, as this is called, offers you more protection that you might realize. In the event that one carrier goes down, the other will still be alive.

To maximize the benefit of redundancy, consider looking for redundant circuits from different carriers that have different pathway in Fort Lauderdale. This means that you should try to have the circuits come into you building from different sides. The circuits would be attached to telephone poles (or underground conduits) in different directions leading to different data centers or central offices. Having redundancy in different physical directions can protect you if there is a serious incident at a data center or some accident that causes a regional circuit issue.

What Are the Costs Associated With Not Adequately Protecting Your Organization High-Speed Internet access?

Although access to The net comes at a price, the price of unreliable Internet access is tremendous. Please think about the following scenarios:

Your company telephone utilizes voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP as it is commonly known

You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants 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 caliber of the call be affected? Are the calls going to be dropped? Perhaps you will sound choppy or will be inaudible.

Your business is the central data point for multiple locations

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 organization. All of your locations, you may have 2, you may have 500, you may have 4, 000, rely on your main Internet connection to access and receive data. What happens if your circuit goes down? Will it cause disastrous results of just annoy you a little bit? Is work even possible at your other sites? What will happen to new orders? Can they be taken or processed? Dispense and receive data? Make sure you completely understand your needs before you pick a solution. You might have hundreds and hundreds of loyal customers. Perhaps you are a software company running a hosted solution they all rely on. Perhaps you operate a service where other systems communicate with yours via an API to calculate freight prices, commodity prices, collect current weather data or receive any other information that you serve up. What if other systems can’t connect to your office servers? How long will your customers tolerate repeated outages?

You are a call center and you completely rely on VoIP

Is the net integral to the proper function of your organization? Do you count on it entirely? What if your representatives can make no outgoing telephone calls because your circuits go down? Calls coming in would be unanswerable. You might not even know people are trying to reach your office. Looks like you are now out of business. While most reputable call centers are already aware and using redundancy, is it enough? Are your current providers as dependable as you would like? Are you getting quality service so that your calls are clear and consistent?

Select the Fort Lauderdale High-Speed Organization Access Circuits Best Suited for Your Company

It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your budget, as well as the needs of your company, will help drive your decisions. To recap:

Internet Access for Smaller Businesses

If you have one location or office and do not feel the need to consider redundancy for your system, a smaller access to The Internet circuit may be all you need. A single fifty, ten or five megabyte circuit might be enough. You may find that if your building is “lit”, gigabit service and Metro Ethernet service may be reasonably cost-effective choices 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

Mid sized companies with a single office in Fort Lauderdale, need higher speed access to The net. You have several choices. Consider the following: Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet or higher-speed access to The net circuits. Optimally, multiple providers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. Achieving this may not be as costly as you first thought. Two smaller circuits may be cheaper than one. For instance, you may use two 50 meg circuits instead of a single 100 meg circuit. Remember, costs vary. So does availability. Speaking with one of our experts will help you determine the options available in your specific location.

Access to the internet for the Mid-Sized Business with Several Offices

What companies have the highest risk for failure; those with multiple locations. Redundant circuits are a necessity. It is helpful if they use multiple providers. Also, redundant equipment such as switches and routers in your facility can minimize the risk of downtime. Before you make a decision here too, do your research. Look closely into Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. The right combination of services and providers can positively impact the efficiency of your organization.

Providers of services that rely on the internet for their delivery, big corporate clients and enterprise customers

If you can place yourself in this category, it is essential that you have Metro Ethernet, point-to-point circuits and gigabit Internet circuits. Having redundant hardware as well as redundant circuits from different providers will ensure your needed 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.

Receive a Free Internet Need and Demand Analysis

Do you understand how great the risk of failing circuits and insufficient bandwidth really is? Your ideal single circuit or multiple circuits should stay within your budget while still meeting your demands. You have to select the optimal combination of hardware and circuits, which is a daunting task.

Our expert engineers will review your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. We will look at your current usage, demand levels and scope out a design to give you the resources you need while keeping your organization up and running at a reasonable cost.

Please click here to complete the contact form on the right side of this page or call our office to schedule an appointment for an assessment. Assessments are completed in as little as 48 hours.