Reliable access to The web is the lifeblood of La Quinta companies and their company. All companies, large and small, need fast and reliable access to The net.
Our dependence on access to The net will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
From video conferencing to voice over IP, email to data sharing and data archiving to Internet commerce, the internet is everywhere you look. How can your needs be met? Maybe a cable modem is a sufficient solution. Do you need Metro Ethernet? Your needs may be met with Gigabit Internet. What is best for your company in La Quinta? Will your business needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg Internet access or 100 Meg access to The net point?
Before selecting the appropriate service, your company must assess its needs. Is the web only used for web surfing and email? Is it used for real-time data connection with cloud servers? Perhaps you, in La Quinta, are hosting the data and remote places rely upon this.
Have you thought about what happens to your organization if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? Will your business suffer from the lull? Is uptime required? Before making a purchase, these are some of the questions you need to answer.
In the broadest of terms, companies need high-speed access to The Internet. When choosing the right broadband for business, you need to analyze and balance the costs and benefits. Don’t be distracted by terminology. While you may hear service providers throw out words and phrases like:
… focus on what matters: what does your business need and what are the best services and solutions out there to meet those needs?
Workers for most companies in La Quinta have some need to access the web during the course of their job. Third party applications, business research or development and e-commerce are just a few of the ways the web may be needed.
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 50 employees who are using the net simultaneously, you may need more.
Your need for high-speed Internet may be lessened if your workers are just accessing an intranet systemHowever, employees who must often download documents, images and videos, need that speed.
Are you regularly performing backups? Synchronizing your backup data after doing remote backups from every desk requires you to support simultaneous connections out to the web.
Are you using a service such as DropBox or Google drive to share files? 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.
Depending on your location, high-speed company Internet access, including Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in La Quinta. Carriers have already wired these buildings. If you’d like to install high-speed Internet in your office, you should know that it might be more affordable than you realize.
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. You can actually get high-speed access with gigabit Internet or even Metro Ethernet quickly. It often takes only 30 days or less, depending on availability.
Consider whether your organization hosts its own servers that run APIs, websites and/or data to outside buildings, offices or companies. Do your headquarters have a hosted Internet application that must be accessed regularly by 40 or 50 branch offices? Perhaps you are in retail and host the point of sale (POS) system for thousands of stores? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different sites?
Access to data and programs by people outside of your main location becomes necessary when you host information centrally. For those people, no Internet connection means no work gets done. Are you choosing an intranet solution that is sufficiently reliable and stable to support multiple simultaneous connections from varied sites?
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. While all offer high speeds, they also need to be capable of supporting multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would probably not be enough.
In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple tenants. During peak hours, your connection may slow down, even though you subscribe to a cable modem with a thirty-megabyte connection. Many cable companies only deliver a set amount of bandwidth within a community. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. The 30-meg speed you are capped out sounds good but it is possible that you will never reach that speed during company hours. If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?
Other providers do offer dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. 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.
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.
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.
The truth is that circuits can go down in La Quinta even though some carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?
Consider redundant circuits.
There are, in essence, two types of redundancy.
With the first type of redundancy, you receive multiple circuits from the same carrier. Redundant circuits help protect you from certain failures including physical line issues, port issues within routers, and others. 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.
In the second type of redundancy, you bring in circuits from two different providers. 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. 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. You will still have a live, fully functioning carrier if one fails.
If you want to maximize redundancy in La Quinta please consider the following question: Do the carriers I am considering use the same physical geographic pathways? Your goal should be to get circuits coming into your building on different sides. You do not want them on the same side. 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. If a major accident occurs or there is a fire that impedes the function of circuits in a particular region, you have redundancy in a different direction.
It is true that access to The Internet costs you money. However, the cost does not come close to what you will pay if the access that is not reliable. 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 the course of a regular work day, any or all of these other businesses might be performing massive file downloads. Tenants might be taking a large volume of calls or be regularly streaming video. As the amount of accessible bandwidth decreases, what will happen to your needs? What happens to your phone calls? What happens to the strength and quality of that call? Are calls lost or dropped? Will you sound muffled or choppy to your customers?
Your office may be the working center of an entire business 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. Your primary Internet connection is solely responsible for smoothly granting access and sending data to all of your places whether you have two or two thousand. Your circuit goes down, now what happens? Is it simply an irritation or a catastrophe? How much work, if any, can be done by your remote locations? What about new orders? Share information? It is important that prior to choosing a solution, you understand the true needs and requirements of your particular business. Perhaps you have hundreds of clients or customers that use a hosted solution that your software business is running. You may operate a service like this: other systems talk to yours via an API to figure out freight rates, stock prices, to compile weather data or receive any other information that you provide. What happens when they are unable to connect to your servers? Customers do not enjoy repeated outages. How long with they put up with them before looking to take their organization elsewhere?
Your organization is 100% dependent on the internet to properly function. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. 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 organization. For competent call centers that already use and understand the problems that can arise, is redundancy enough? Are your current carriers as dependable as you would like? You should be getting high quality service that ensures your calls are consistently clear and reliable.
You clearly have several choices. Your decision will be based on different factors including your business needs and your budget. In summary:
If you are a small business, 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. You may find that if your building is “lit”, gigabit service and Metro Ethernet service may be reasonably cost-effective choices for you. The availability of circuits and your location determine prices; speak with one of our engineers to learn what your best options are.
Mid sized companies with a single office in La Quinta, California, need higher speed access to The web. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Ideally, you want to have the greatest redundancy. You can achieve this by using multiple circuits from different providers. You may be able to achieve this in a manner that will not break the bank. For example, one 100-megabyte circuit may cost more than two smaller 50-megabyte circuits. Again, costs and availability vary. In order to find out the options available for you, in your location, you need to speak with one of our seasoned experts.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of organization or offices. Redundant circuits must be an essential part of their systems. Multiple providers are highly desirable. Additionally, you should consider redundant equipment (routers and switches) in your facility to 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 right mix of providers and services will help keep your organization up and running as efficiently as possible.
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 must have redundant circuits for multiple providers as well as redundant hardware in your office to ensure your uptime. The last thing you want is interruptions or slowdowns affecting your business. You must provide enough bandwidth to avoid these pitfalls that sometimes occur during sudden usage spikes. The hardware and circuits you choose must both be able to support the following: a great number of concurrent, speedy connections.
Do you understand how great the risk of failing circuits and insufficient bandwidth really is? Your demand and budget constraints should both be considered when you decide what circuit or combination of circuits you must have. Choosing the right combination of hardware and circuits can be complicated and confusing.
Our engineers will take the pressure off and develop a free action plan for you by analyzing your needs. 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 call our office for an assessment appointment or click here to complete the contact form on the right side of the page. It can take as little as 48 hours to provide a complete assessment.