In today’s environment, companies in Huntington, West Virginia count on reliable access to The web as the lifeblood of their company. Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and everything in between, count on reliable and fast Internet access.
Our reliance on access to the internet will become greater in the near and distant future.
From email messaging to information sharing, e-commerce to archiving data, and voice over IP to video conferencing, the net is omnipresent. What is the best fix for your needs? Maybe a cable modem is a sufficient solution. Metro Ethernet may be the thing you need. Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. 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 business in Huntington, West Virginia?
The needs of your particular organization must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Why will you need the net? Will you only be web surfing and emailing? Is it used to network with cloud servers? You may be hosting the data in Huntington and remote sites rely on this.
What if your high-speed Internet is disrupted by an outage? What will happen to your business? Will your company suffer from the lull? Is the absence of uptime detrimental? These types of questions must be answered before you make purchase anything.
Speaking broadly, all companies need high-speed access to the internet. When choosing the right broadband internet for company, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. While many service providers throw around terminologies such as:
… do not lose sight of the real issues: what are the capabilities and technical solutions you need to best serve your company?
Most companies in Huntington, West Virginia require that some or all of their workers have access to the web. Whether it is for organization research, to order supplies or to use third-party applications, the web is required.
Your best course of action may be determined by the size of your work force. 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 your business has nearly 50 people, however, and they all need to use the net at the same time, you may find that more is better.
You may not need as much high-speed access to The web if your employees work primarily on an intranet system with limited graphics and video. 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? If, as recommended, you conduct remote backups from every single desk, you will need to support simultaneous connections out to the web. This will allow you to sync your backup data.
Are you using Google drive, DropBox or another file sharing service? This is how a file sharing service works: You save a file. Then the file is pushed to the cloud, and is then synchronized with other people’s computers. Supporting file sharing, while supporting every other service, requires sufficient bandwidth.
Are you interested in high-speed company Internet? Depending on where you are located, you may want to look into the viability of gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet. These can usually be found in Huntington in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. If you’d like to install high-speed Internet in your office, you should know that it might be more affordable than you realize.
While it may be the case that bringing Metro Ethernet into a new building can cause a big dent in your wallet, bringing the connection to a suite or offices within that building does not have to. Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet may provide you with high-speed Internet access in thirty days or less, depending on availability.
Do you have your own organization servers that run APIs, websites or feeds for offsite offices or companies? Maybe your company requires that dozens of satellite offices have access to a hosted application at your company main headquarters. Are you hosting the point of sale (POS) system for 15, 000 retail chain stores? Are you an attorney with offices multiple cities or states? Do you have one office hosting data for several places?
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. If the net connection is interrupted or fails, those people are unable to accomplish any work. 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?
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 headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. Multiple diverse connections require support, in addition to high speed. Do you think a cable modem is sufficient? It is probably not.
Bringing in a cable modem, which seems to save money, may actually come at a price. Oftentimes, a lower monthly rate comes with the realization that you are sharing bandwidth with many different tenants and offices. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper speeds during peak hours. Only a certain amount of bandwidth may be available in a community. Many cable companies have limits on the amount they can deliver. That amount of bandwidth must be shared with different buildings and with the tenants housed within. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? Do you care if you only get 6 when you were set up to expect 30?
Guaranteed bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth are solutions that some providers offer. In this case, your organization receives full allocation of bandwidth. There is no sharing with any outsiders. 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.
Metro Ethernet provides guaranteed bandwidth in increments as follows: 5, 10, 50 and 100 Meg circuits. Gigabit speeds from your office to the net can be reached if you use a gigabit Internet provider.
In these scenarios, carriers deliver a large quantity of high-speed to a building. The quantity must be enough so that it can split the circuit and deliver to every tenant. Whatever amount has been guaranteed in each tenant’s contract is the amount they receive.
You can’t control everything. Even with the superior Internet bandwidth products that some providers offer in Huntington, West Virginia, problems arise and circuits can fail. In what way can you diminish the risk of an outage?
Redundant circuits.
Redundancy in this situation comes in two forms.
The first type is when one single carrier provides you with multiple circuits. These redundant circuits help protect from certain failures, for example, router port issues or physical line trouble. However, if that carrier has a regional outage or physical line damaged outside of your building, both circuits may go down. This offers some protection and assurance but does not eliminate all threats.
The second way to set up circuit redundancy is by using two different providers to bring in your circuits. Advanced routers and IP address allocations can be utilized to make it look to your users and the public that you have a single circuit. However, despite appearances, they are actually very much separate and are redundant to each other. This redundancy, referred to as diversity redundancy, offers much greater protection. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
You should look for redundant circuits from providers in Huntington, West Virginia that do not have the same physical geographic pathways, in order to get the most 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. This way, if there is a major catastrophe, such as a fire at a data center or a major accident impacting circuits within a region, you have redundancy in a different physical direction.
Although Internet access comes at a price, the price of unreliable Internet access is tremendous. Contemplate these scenarios:
Is your organization on a cable modem? How many other tenants is your carrier servicing in your building? Are 14 other offices getting circuits? What if any or all of those tenants are huge call centers taking in a massive volume of phone calls, are business that perform large file downloads or stream many videos? What will happen to your telephone calls as the amount of usable bandwidth decreases? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Will you lose calls? Perhaps you will sound choppy or will be inaudible.
Your office may be the working center of an entire company 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 sites, whether 2 or 2000, depend on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. How will you be affected if your circuit goes down? Would it annoy you or destroy you? Can meaningful work be conducted at your remote offices? Take new orders? Service existing ones? Disseminate needed information and data? It is important that prior to choosing a solution, you understand the true needs and requirements of your particular company. Perhaps you are a software company, running a hosted solution used by hundreds of customers. You may operate a service like this: other systems talk to yours via an API to figure out freight prices, stock prices, to compile weather data or receive any other information that you provide. You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your company servers. Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?
Is the net integral to the proper function of your business? Do you rely on it entirely? Your employees or representatives will not be able to make outgoing phone calls if your circuits go down. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. Basically, you are out of organization. Even for the most reputable call centers that already know of and use redundancy, is it sufficient? Are you really getting the dependable service you need form your carriers? Are you using carriers that are truly reliable? You should be getting high quality service that ensures your calls are consistently clear and reliable.
You clearly have many options. Your organization needs and your budget will have to come into consideration when deciding on your solutions. To summarize:
If your company is small, with one location or office, you are likely not concerned about redundancy. For you, a single 5, 10 or 50 megabyte Internet access circuit may suffice. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Prices change based on your location and the availability of circuits. Please speak with our engineers about what options best suit your needs.
Mid sized companies with a single office in Huntington, West Virginia, need higher speed access to The Internet. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Ideally, multiple circuits from multiple providers will provide you with the greatest redundancy. Achieving this may cost extra but it won’t double your costs. Using one 100-megabyte circuit instead of two 50-megabyte circuits, is one example. Remember, costs vary. So does availability. 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. Redundant circuits must be an essential part of their systems. Having several providers would afford extra protection. In addition, consider redundant equipment. Redundant routers and switches can minimize risk also. 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.
Companies such as these require the following: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and point-to-point (PPP) high-speed Internet circuits. You absolutely need redundant circuits from different providers as well as redundant hardware. This is vital to ensuring uptime. You must have the bandwidth to withstand sharp increases in usage. Doing so will help protect you from slowdowns or interruptions. Your circuits and hardware must be able to support a large number of fast and simultaneous connections.
Insufficient bandwidth and failing circuits are present tremendous risk to your organization. The circuit or circuits you have must stay within the parameters of your budget while still meeting your organization needs. Selecting the appropriate mix of circuits and hardware can overwhelm you.
We have experts to help. Our engineers will do an analysis of your needs and requirements, and develop a free action plan for you based on their findings. We’ll formulate a design or plan based partly on your current usage and demand levels. We will create something cost effective that gives you the resources your organization needs, while keeping it running smoothly.
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. It can take less than 48 hours to complete your assessment.