Huntsville, Alabama High-Speed Internet Access

Huntsville, Alabama High Speed Access to The Net: Metro Ethernet Access, Gigabit Internet and Company Broadband Internet

The lifeblood of Huntsville, Alabama companies doing company in the current environment depends upon reliable Internet access. All companies rely on reliable and quick Internet access. This is true no matter how large or small the organization.

Internet access will become increasingly vital to us in the coming months and years. Our dependence on access to The web will only grow as time goes on.

Our uses of the internet reach far and wide. From data sharing, video calls, and shopping to VOIP and email, the internet has a broad presence. How can your needs be met? Is a cable modem sufficient? Do you need Metro Ethernet? Is Gigabit Internet right for you? What is best for your company in Huntsville, Alabama? Will your company needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg access to The Internet or 100 Meg access to The web point?

How to Define your Company Need for Internet Access

Your company must assess its real needs. This must be done before an appropriate service can be chosen. Why will you need the internet? Will you only be web surfing and emailing? Is real time data connection with cloud servers important to your organization? Are you hosting data in Huntsville, Alabama? Do remote locations rely upon you?

What if your high-speed Internet is disrupted by an outage? What will happen to your business? Can your company afford the downtime? How much uptime is essential to your organization? You must answer these questions before you buy.

Evaluating Different High-Speed Internet Solutions in Huntsville

Plainly stated, companies require high-speed Internet access. When choosing the right broadband for company, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. While various providers will throw around terminology like:

• High-speed access to the Internet
• Business Internet service
• What about broadband cable modems?
• Metropolitan-area Ethernet
• GbE services or Gigabit Internet
• Multiprotocol label switching, also known as MPLS
• Services related to point-to-point circuits
• Internet access circuits-five megabyte
• Ten megabyte access to The Internet provided
• We have fifty-megabyte access to The net circuits
• One hundred megabytes- fast Internet access circuits
• Sip trunking specialists
• Dedicated or “specific” Internet access
• … and more

… do not lose sight of the real issues: what are the capabilities and technical solutions you need to best serve your company?

Business Internet access for Surfing the Worldwide Web

For most companies in Huntsville, some or all of the employees need access to the net. There are countless reasons to need access to the net. Perhaps it is to order materials, to conduct business research or talk to clients.

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 you have many employees who need to use the net at the same time, you may do better with more.

You may not need as much high-speed Internet access if your employees work primarily on an intranet system with limited graphics and video. If your business functions demand the downloading of documents and images or videos on a regular basis, speed becomes a must more important issue.

Are you regularly performing backups? If you are doing remote backups from every desk, which is advisable, you will need to be able to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize your backup data.

Google drive and DropBox are two popular sharing services. Are you using one of these or some other service that allows you to share files? As people save files, those files are pushed to the cloud and then synchronized back to other people’s computers. Supporting file sharing, while supporting every other service, requires sufficient bandwidth.

High-speed organization Internet access like Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options for you depending on your location. These can usually be found in Huntsville in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. Installing high-speed Internet may not be as difficult and expensive as you think.

Absent the need to introduce Metro Ethernet into a new building, it is not particularly costly to connect Metro Ethernet to a suite or office within that building. 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.

Hosted Applications Requiring High-Speed Internet Access

Does your business host its own servers running websites, APIs or data feeds for other offices or companies outside of your own four walls? Are your corporate headquarters with a hosted application utilized by 50 branch offices? Is your organization 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 locations?

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. Make sure that when you choose your intranet solution it is reliable enough to support your need for multiple and simultaneous connections for many different places.

For one office or a small organization with just one or two people surfing the web, a less expensive 10 Meg circuit or a cable modem may meet your needs. For headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. This could probably not be accomplished with a cable modem.

Cable Circuit Sharing in Huntsville Versus Dedicated Bandwidth: What is Right For You?

In many cases, installing an inexpensive cable modem comes at a price. There may be a lower monthly rate, but bandwidth is usually shared with many tenants. You may experience slow downs. For example, although you subscribe to a cable modem with a thirty Meg connection, it can be difficult to maintain the maximum speed during busy times and peak hours. Many cable operators can only deliver a certain amount of bandwidth in a community. That bandwidth reaches out like branches to every building in the community and the people living and working in those buildings. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? Is getting 7 when you expect 30 a problem?

Some providers offer customers dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, you do not have to share bandwidth. The bandwidth is all yours and is fully allocated to the needs of your organization. The full capacity of your circuit should be attainable during all hours regardless of neighboring buildings, people or offices.

Five Meg, ten Meg, fifty Meg and 100 Meg circuits of guaranteed bandwidth are available with Metro Ethernet. If you want to reach gigabit speeds from your business out to the net, you can by using a gigabit Internet provider.

In these situations, each tenant receives their contracted high-speed. The carrier delivers enough so they can split their circuit and provide enough to each tenant.

Redundancy With Huntsville, Alabama High Speed Organization Internet Circuits

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

The answer is redundant circuits.

Redundancy basically comes in two forms.

The first kind of redundancy exists when one carrier provides one customer with many circuits. 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.

Circuit redundancy can also be achieved in the following way: Import circuits using two different and distinct carriers. 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. Though they may appear as one, you know that they are each individual circuits and redundant to each other. Diversity redundancy offers far greater protection. 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.

For maximum redundancy, you should look for redundant circuits from different carriers with different physical geographic pathways in Huntsville. If at all possible, you want to obtain circuits entering the premises on different sides. The circuits would attached to the proper outside source whether a subterranean conduit or a telephone pole. They would be set up in different directions and would lead to different data centers or main office spaces. 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.

What is the Price of Not Having Adequate Protection for Your Business High-Speed Internet access?

The cost to your company if you do not have reliable access to The web will be far greater than you may realize. Please think about the following scenarios:

The phone service in your office relies on Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

The carrier you use for your cable modem also provides circuits for a dozen or more tenants in the office building. During your working day, those tenants could be conducting massive downloads of information, processing a large amount of calls or streaming endless video. As available bandwidth shrinks, what will happen to your calls? What about the quality of your calls? Are the calls going to be dropped? Will your voice be inaudible? Will you have difficulty hearing the other end?

Maybe your business acts as a data center for various other locations

Your office is the hub of your enterprise: You might be a law practice that shares files, a retail operation that utilizes POS systems or a large accounting firm that needs to share databases. Your primary Internet connection is responsible for granting access to data to all of your sites. This is true whether you have 3 locations or 2000 locations. What if your circuit fails? Would you merely be annoyed? Would there be catastrophic consequences? Can meaningful work be conducted at your remote offices? Take new orders? Service existing ones? Disseminate needed information and data? Choosing the right solution depends largely on assessing and understanding the specific needs of your company. 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. You operate a service that utilizes API in order to grant access to other systems. They may use this to collect whatever data you are offering such as commodity prices, weather data or freight calculations. What if you have server problems and they are unable to connect to you? Will your customers remain loyal to you if they have to withstand multiple outages?

Your call center uses VoIP

What if your business could not function at all without the web? Maybe your organization depends upon it completely. If your circuits go down, you cannot make calls. In addition, they will be unable to answer incoming calls. Your company is basically done with. Is redundancy enough? Are the carriers 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?

Select the Huntsville High-Speed Business 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. As a wrap-up:

Internet Access for the Small Company Owner

If you are a small company, with one location and you do not worry about redundancy, one five meg, ten meg, or fifty meg Internet access circuit may very well be enough to meet your needs. If you are in a “lit” building, Metro Ethernet or gigabit service may be reasonably priced options. 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 Businesses Internet access – One Location

If you have a midsized organization in Huntsville, Alabama, you will need higher-speed Internet access. Your choices include: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or other high-speed circuits. Using different circuits and different carriers will, if you choose, provide you with redundancy. But can you do this without doubling costs? Sometimes, yes. 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.

Internet Access for the Medium Sized Company with Multiple Offices

Companies with multiple sites are most at risk for failure. Redundant circuits are a necessity. Having several providers would afford extra protection. 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 access to The web circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. Your company can benefit from finding the right mix of services and carriers.

Clients who provide services delivered via Internet, large corporate and enterprise clientele

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. If you want to ensure your valuable uptime, have redundant circuits from multiple providers as well as redundant hardware. You do not want any slowdowns or interruptions that often occur during spikes in usage. Avoid this by having sufficient bandwidth. Be sure to have the right circuits and hardware. They both must be able to support multiple, fast, concurrent connections.

Free Internet Demand and Need Analysis

There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. Your ideal single circuit or multiple circuits should stay within your budget while still meeting your demands. There is tremendous pressure on you to choose the best combination of circuits and hardware.

Our engineers will take the pressure off and develop a free action plan for you by analyzing your needs. We are going to examine your current usage and demand levels then create a design that provides you with the resources you need to keep your organization running smoothly at a reasonable cost.

If you would like to arrange for an assessment, please click here to complete the contact information form to the right. You can call our office as well. Your assessment may be finished within as little as 48 hours.