The Net in Memphis, Tennessee: High-Speed Access

Access to High Speed Internet in Memphis, Tennessee: Metro Ethernet Access, Company Broadband Internet and Gigabit Internet

These days, companies in Memphis, Tennessee rely on reliable access to The Internet as the lifeblood of their business. The organization functions of all companies, from Fortune 500 to small companies, depend on fast and reliable Internet access.

In the coming months and years, we are going to become increasingly dependent on our access to the internet.

Our uses of the net reach far and wide. From data sharing, video calls, and shopping to VOIP and email, the web has a broad presence. What is the right solution for your needs? A cable modem may be satisfactory. Maybe you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet may be required. What does your Memphis, Tennessee company need? Does it require 10 Meg access to The Internet, a 100 Meg access to The web point, a 50 Meg circuit or a 5 Meg circuit?

Internet Access: Defining the Company Need

Prior to selecting a service, your company must figure out its needs. Is Internet use limited to website surfing or emailing only? Will Internet usage mainly involve cloud servers and real time data connection? There may be remote places that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Memphis.

Have you thought about what happens to your organization if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? How might the downtime cause problems for your company? How much uptime is essential to your business? Ask yourself these questions before making any purchases. The answers will help you determine what is right for you.

Evaluating Memphis, Tennessee High Speed Internet Solutions

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 internet. Many service providers toss out terms such as:

• Internet access at high-speeds
• Business Internet / Internet for business
• We provide broadband cable modems
• Metro Ethernet service
• Gigabit Ethernet services or Gigabit Internet
• Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)
• Services related to point-to-point circuits
• Five megabyte Internet access circuit
• Internet access circuits-10 Meg
• Internet access- 50 megabytes
• Internet access circuits- One hundred megabytes
• Session Initiation Protocol/ Sip trunk
• dedicated Internet access
• … and more

… 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 Memphis have some need to access the net during the course of their job. Internet access may be needed to conduct research, use third-party applications or to order supplies.

The solution you choose may be based on the number of employees you have or expect to have. If you have a handful of employees, a 5 or 10 Meg Internet circuit may be sufficient. You may need more if you have more workers and those workers all need to be on the net during the same hours.

Perhaps most workers at your company use an intranet system with limited features. High- speed Internet may not be a priority in this case. On the other hand, when they are frequently downloading documents, images and videos, that need for speed increases drastically.

Does your organization regularly conduct backups? It is recommended that you do remote backups from every desk. If you are, you will need to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize the backup data to collect.

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? 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.

Depending on where you are, you may want to look into high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet. They are usually contained in “lit buildings” in Memphis that have already been wired by a carrier. Choosing to add high-speed Internet to your office is a tough decision but it can be less expensive and easier than you think.

Unless you are bringing Metro Ethernet into a new building, it does not have to be an expensive proposition to connect it to a suite within a building. Did you know that obtaining high-speed access to The web with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet can often take 30 days or less? Of course, this depends upon availability.

High-Speed access to The web Required for Hosting Applications

Does your company host its own servers? Does your company use the hosted servers to run data feeds, APIs or websites for offices or businesses located elsewhere? Are your company headquarters with a hosted application accessed by 50 branch offices? Is your company retail? Do you have thousands of stores? Do you host the point of sale system for the entire chain? Do you run a law office that hosts the data for satellite offices in different cities or states?

If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. If your Internet connection goes down, those people are unable to work. Are you picking an intranet solution that provides reliability and stability for your multiple, simultaneous connections from various sites?

For a single office surfing the web, a cable modem or inexpensive 10 Meg circuit may be sufficient. Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable for the headquarters where high-speed Internet access is important. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. This could probably not be accomplished with a cable modem.

Shared Cable Circuits in Memphis Versus Dedicated Internet Bandwidth

Bringing in a cable modem, which seems to save money, may actually come at a price. There may be a lower monthly rate, but bandwidth is usually shared with many tenants. While you may subscribe to a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection, you may be unable to reach those 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. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. Will you achieve 30-meg speed during the working day? Is getting 7 when you expect 30 a problem?

Other carriers do offer dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this case, your company 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.

As an example, look at Metro Ethernet. They provide guaranteed bandwidth in various increments. You can receive guaranteed bandwidth in increments of 100, 50, 10 and 5 megabytes. With gigabit Internet providers, you can reach gigabit speeds in your office out to the web.

In these cases, the carriers deliver high-speed to the building in sufficient quantity that they can then split their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing each tenant is receiving their contracted speeds.

Redundant High Speed Organization Internet Circuits in Memphis

Memphis has some providers that offer exceptional Internet bandwidth products and services. However, circuits can still go down and cause disruption. In what way can you diminish the risk of an outage?

Redundant circuits.

We are primarily talking about two kinds of redundancy.

A single carrier, providing multiple circuits, to one customer, characterizes one form of redundancy. 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. If your carrier experiences a regional outage or you have a line broken outside of your building, you may lose the use of all of your circuits. This is not foolproof, but does offer some protection.

In the second type of redundancy, you bring in circuits from two 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. 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 problem, the other likely will not.

For maximum redundancy, you should look for redundant circuits from different providers with different physical geographic pathways in Memphis, Tennessee. Essentially, this just means that you do not want both of your circuits to enter the building on the same side. They should come in on different sides. They would be on outside phone poles or underground conduits in different directions and leading to different places. If you can accomplish this, you are protected from a major catastrophe. For example, if a there is a fire or some other accident that negatively affects circuits in a region, you have redundancy in a physically different direction.

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

Although Internet access comes at a price, the price of unreliable Internet access is tremendous. Contemplate these situations:

Your office relies on Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for its phone service

Your company is on a cable modem and your carrier provides circuits to 20 other offices 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? As available bandwidth shrinks, what will happen to your calls? How will it affect the quality of that telephone call? Will you lose calls? Will you sound muffled?

Is your business the central data location for multiple offices?

Your office is the hub of your company, whether you are a retail business operating a distributed point of sale (POS) system, an accounting firm sharing databases or a law firm engaged in file sharing. All of your sites, whether 2 or 2000, depend on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. What if your circuit fails? Would it cause mere annoyance or utter disaster? Are remote offices able to work at all? What will happen to new orders? Can they be taken or processed? Share information? Choosing the right solution depends largely on assessing and understanding the specific needs of your business. You have a software company, and are running a hosted solution for dozens, maybe hundreds, of customers. Maybe you offer a service that allows other systems use an application program interface (API) to talk to you to collect information and data. What if these other systems have difficulty connecting your servers? Will your customers remain loyal to you if they have to withstand multiple outages?

The phones in your office, which functions as a call center, relies entirely on voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP)

What if your organization could not function at all without the web? Maybe your business depends on it completely. No outbound calls can be made should your circuits go down. Calls coming in would be unanswerable. You might not even know people are trying to reach your office. You are now, essentially, out of business. 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 providers? Are you using providers that are truly reliable? Are you getting quality service so that your calls are clear and consistent?

The Correct High-Speed Business Access Circuits for Your Memphis, Tennessee Company: How to Choose

You have no shortage of options. Your choices will largely count on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your organization. As a wrap-up:

Your Small Business and Access to the Internet

Sometimes redundancy is not vital to you. For example, If you are a small business, with just one office location, a single access to The net circuit may be adequate. You may get by with one 50, 10 or even 5 megabyte circuit. You may find that if your building is “lit”, gigabit service and Metro Ethernet service may be reasonably cost-effective choices for you. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.

Mid-Sized Company access to The net: One Location

Mid sized companies with a single office in Memphis, need higher speed access to The Internet. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Optimally, multiple providers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. This may be attainable without doubling your costs. Two smaller circuits may be cheaper than one. For instance, you may use two 50 meg circuits instead of a single 100 meg circuit. As a reminder; availability and costs may vary. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.

Access to the web for the Mid-Sized Company with Several Offices

Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. Redundancy is crucial. Multiple providers are highly desirable. You can minimize the risk of downtime at if you also have redundant equipment like routers or switches. Look at all of your options: Ethernet access services, gigabit Internet providers, Metro Ethernet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your organization run as efficiently as possible.

Bigger corporations, enterprise companies and providers of services that are delivered using Internet

For companies falling in this category, gigabit Internet circuits, Metro Ethernet Internet circuits and point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits are essential. Redundant hardware and redundant circuits will, for these businesses, ensure the greatest uptime. Be sure the circuits are from different providers. Spikes or sudden increase in usage can result in Internet slowdowns or disruptions in service. You can decrease the risk of these events by having sufficient bandwidth. It is crucial that not only your circuits have the ability to support a vast number of multiple and simultaneous connects, but your hardware must have the ability to support them as well.

Receive a Free Internet Need and Demand Analysis

Do not risk having failing circuits or not enough bandwidth. Your demand and budget constraints should both be considered when you decide what circuit or combination of circuits you must have. You have to select the optimal combination of hardware and circuits, which is a daunting task.

Our engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. We’ll examine your current usage and demand levels then create a design that provides you with the resources you need to keep your business running smoothly at a reasonable cost.

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. We do assessments quickly. It can take as little as 48 hours to complete your analysis.