In today’s environment, companies in Hanford, California depend on reliable Internet access as the lifeblood of their organization. All companies, large and small, need fast and reliable Internet access.
Our reliance on access to the web will become greater in the near and distant future.
The web 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 do you need? Is a cable modem enough? It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. What is best for your business in Hanford, California? Will your business needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg Internet access or 100 Meg Internet access point?
The needs of your particular business must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Perhaps the web is only used for a few things such as email communication or surfing the web. Is real time data connection with cloud servers essential to your organization? Are you hosting the data in Hanford and distant locations or offices rely on you?
What if you have a disruption in your high-speed Internet? Can your company afford a long pause or lull in productivity? Is uptime essential? You must answer questions like these so you can make a purchase that actually meets your needs
High-speed access to the internet is something all companies need. You need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits to your company before choosing the right broadband. While many providers throw around terminologies such as:
… the actual issue is knowing what technology and capability can satisfy your needs.
Workers for most companies in Hanford, California have some need to access the web during the course of their job. It may be needed for company research, to order office supplies or other reasons.
The number of workers you have may be the factor that drives your decision. 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 more than that, you may need more.
You may not need as much high-speed access to The Internet if your employees work primarily on an intranet system with limited graphics and video. 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? 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.
Does your company require employees to share files using a service like Google drive or DropBox? After a file is saved, it goes to the cloud and then to someone else’s computer. Supporting file sharing, while supporting every other service, requires sufficient bandwidth.
High-speed business access to The net like Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options for you depending on your location. “Lit buildings” that have already been wired by a carrier, are commonly the site for these. Adding this high-speed Internet to your office may be surprisingly affordable and easy.
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 internet with either gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. It depends upon availability.
Your company may host its own servers. Do they run websites APIs or data feeds for external offices? Maybe your organization requires that dozens of satellite offices have access to a hosted application at your company main headquarters. Are you a retail chain hosting the POS system for 12, 000 stores? You may be a law firm hosting data for three or four different offices.
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. Can your intranet solution support your needs? Can it support multiple simultaneous connections? Is it stable enough to handle this when they are from various locations?
If you have one office using the web, you may get by with a cable modem or a low- cost 10-megabyte circuit. For headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. Multiple diverse connections require support, in addition to high speed. A cable modem would likely not provide the necessary support.
Bringing in a less-expensive circuit like a cable modem often comes with a price. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple tenants. 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. Many cable companies only deliver a set amount of bandwidth within a community. That bandwidth branches off to different buildings and then to various tenants within those buildings. With a 30-megabyte connection, you may not get to that speed during the working day. If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?
Some providers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. With these, bandwidth belongs to you and your organization only; no sharing. 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.
For example, Metro Ethernet guarantees bandwidth in 5 met circuits, 10 Meg circuits, 50 and 100 Meg circuits. You can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit Internet providers.
Providers in these situations deliver enough to cover everyone’s needs. The providers divide their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing that everyone gets their contracted speed.
Despite outstanding Internet bandwidth products offered by providers in Hanford, California, circuits do go down. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?
Try using redundant circuits.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
A single carrier, providing multiple circuits, to one customer, characterizes one form of redundancy. When there are problems with a physical line or a port or other failures, it can be helpful to have redundant circuits. Damage to an external wire or part can cause the failure of all of your circuits. A regional outage experienced by your carrier can have the same result. While there is some security in this, you are still vulnerable under some circumstances.
The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from different carriers. 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. This is called diversity redundancy and offers more protection that the first. Should one carrier have some trouble that extends to a greater area and is out of your control, you are backed up with a different carrier.
You want maximum redundancy. In order to achieve this, look for redundant circuits from different carriers with different physical geographic pathways in Hanford, California. This means that you should try to have the circuits come into you building from 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.
It is true that access to The web costs you money. However, the cost does not come close to what you will pay if the access that is not reliable. Think about the following situations:
The carrier you use for your cable modem also provides circuits for a dozen or more tenants in the office building. It is possible that during normal business hours, those tenants might be downloading large files or watching continuous videos. They might be getting a lot of phone calls. How will less available bandwidth affect your telephone calls? What happens to the strength and quality of that call? Are the calls going to be dropped? Perhaps you will sound choppy or will be inaudible.
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 solely responsible for smoothly granting access and sending data to all of your locations whether you have two or two thousand. How will you be affected if your circuit goes down? Is it a mere annoyance or a catastrophic failure? Are remote offices able to work at all? Process new orders? Disseminate needed information and data? It is important that prior to choosing a solution, you understand the true needs and requirements of your particular business. You might have hundreds and hundreds of loyal customers. Perhaps you are a software company running a hosted solution they all depend on. You may operate a service like this: other systems speak with yours via an API to figure out freight rates, stock prices, to compile weather data or receive any other information that you provide. What will happen when there is a problem connecting to your servers? Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?
Your company is completely dependent on the web. What if your representatives can make no outgoing telephone calls because your circuits go down? They are also unable to answer calls. You are now, essentially, out of business. For competent call centers that already use and understand the problems that can arise, is redundancy enough? Are the providers you currently use as reliable as they should be? Are they as reliable as you need them to be? Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
You have no shortage of options. Your choices will largely rely on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your organization. In review:
Sometimes redundancy is not vital to you. For example, If you are a small business, with just one office location, a single Internet access circuit may be adequate. You may get by with one 50, 10 or even 5 megabyte circuit. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Prices will vary. They are based on your location and circuit availability; speak with our engineers to learn your best options.
You have a mid-sized Hanford company; higher speed access to The Internet required. Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and other higher-speed Internet circuits are your options. Using different circuits and different carriers will, if you choose, provide you with redundancy. Achieving this may not be as costly as you first thought. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. You need to speak with one of our experts to determine your options in your specific location.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. They need redundant circuits. Different carriers are desirable. You can decrease risk during downtime by having redundant equipment as well. Look at all of your options: Ethernet access services, gigabit Internet providers, Metro Ethernet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. The correct combination of providers and services can keep your company running smoothly and efficiently.
If you fall into this group, you must have Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet circuits and point-to-point High-speed Internet circuits. Redundant hardware and redundant circuits will, for these businesses, ensure the greatest uptime. Be sure the circuits are from different providers. Having plenty of bandwidth will help avoid interruptions or decreased speed that sometimes occurs during spikes in usage. Your goal is to have hardware and circuits that are more than capable of providing support to a significant number of fast and simultaneous 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. It is important to choose the correct mix of hardware and circuits. Figuring out exactly what to put in the mix, can be a daunting task.
Our engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. We are going to formulate a design or plan based partly on your current usage and demand levels. We are going to create something cost effective that gives you the resources your company needs, while keeping it running smoothly.
An appointment for an assessment can be made by calling our office or clicking here to complete the contact form on the side of this page. Assessments are done in as few as two days or within 48 hours.