The lifeblood of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina companies doing business in the current environment relies on reliable access to The Internet. Fortune 500 companies to small companies and everything in between, count on reliable and fast Internet access.
Our dependence on access to The net will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
The use of the net is pervasive. We use it for email and data sharing, video conferencing and VOIP, archiving and commerce. What solution bet fits your needs? Maybe a cable modem is a sufficient solution. Maybe you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. Does your Mount Pleasant, South Carolina business need a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg access to The web point?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your company, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Why will you need the internet? Will you only be web surfing and emailing? 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 Mount Pleasant.
What if you have a disruption in your high-speed Internet? How will the downtime affect your company? Is uptime required? You must answer these questions before you buy.
Plainly stated, companies require high-speed access to The net. Before you choose your broadband, look at the costs and benefits. Performing this analysis is an important step in picking the right one for your organization. You will hear service providers use terms like:
… the real issue is understanding what capability and technical solutions best meet your needs.
For most companies in Mount Pleasant, some or all of the employees need access to the net. Internet access may be needed to conduct research, use third-party applications or to order supplies.
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. You may need more if you have more workers and those workers all need to be on the web 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. However, employees who must often download documents, images and videos, need that speed.
Are you performing routine 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.
Does your company require employees to share files using a service like Google drive or DropBox? As a file is saved, it is pushed to the cloud and then synced back to other people’s computers. The right amount of capacity or bandwidth is necessary to support this function in conjunction with every other service you have.
Company high-speed Internet access may interest you. Depending on your location, you may have options such as gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. These can usually be found in Mount Pleasant in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. It may be shock you to know that installing high-speed Internet access may not be particularly expensive or inconvenient.
Introducing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be expensive. Bringing a connection to a suite within the building is not. 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.
Does your business host its own servers to run information feeds, websites or application program interfaces (APIs) with companies or offices located outside of your four walls? Do your headquarters have a hosted Internet application that must be accessed regularly by 40 or 50 branch offices? Is your business retail? Do you have thousands of stores? Do you host the point of sale system for the entire chain? Are you a legal practice hosting the data for three places?
When things are hosted at a central point, parties outside the office must somehow gain access. Those people are not able to work without a solid Internet connection. When deciding on the right intranet solution for your business, ask yourself: Is the solution going to adequately support simultaneous and multiple connections from my different 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 the headquarters, high-speed access to The net including Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable. Multiple diverse connections require support, in addition to high speed. A cable modem would likely be insufficient.
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 use hours, you may not be able to reach proper speeds. Only a certain amount of bandwidth may be available in a community. Many cable companies have limits on the amount they can deliver. That bandwidth reaches out like branches to every building in the community and the people living and working in those buildings. You might be capped at 30-megabyte speed, but may never be able to actually reach that speed during the important hours of your organization day. Will there be trouble if your expectation is set at 30 but you only get 8 or 10?
Other providers do offer dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. With these, bandwidth belongs to you and your organization only; no sharing. Regardless of other tenants in your building or neighboring buildings, you should receive the full capacity of your circuit.
Metro Ethernet provides guaranteed bandwidth in increments as follows: 5, 10, 50 and 100 Meg circuits. In your office out to the net you can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit providers
In these cases, the providers 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.
While certain carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products in Mount Pleasant, the reality is that it is possible for a circuit to go down. The question then becomes, “how do I minimize my chance of an outage? ”
Consider redundant circuits.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
The first type exists when the same carrier gives you multiple 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. However, if that carrier has a regional outage or physical line damaged outside of your building, both circuits may go down. 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 providers. 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. You will still have a live, fully functioning carrier if one fails.
The carriers you choose for your redundant circuits should have different physical pathways in Mount Pleasant. This is an important consideration when trying to obtain the most redundancy. If at all possible, you want to obtain circuits entering the premises on different sides. Whether they are attached underground or to a telephone pole, your goal should be to have the circuits in different directions leading to different central locations. 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.
The cost of dependable access to The web pales in comparison to the cost of unreliable access. Please think about the following scenarios:
Are you on a cable modem and your carrier is providing circuits to dozens of other office suites in your building? During organization hours, any of those tenants could be streaming video, performing massive file downloads, processing large volumes of phone calls and more. As the amount of available bandwidth diminishes, what happens to your phone calls? How will the caliber of the call be affected? Are the calls going to be dropped? Perhaps you will sound choppy or will be inaudible.
Your office may be the working center of an entire company enterprise. The kind of business 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. Every single one of your offices, stores and sites rely on you and your primary Internet connection to retrieve data. How will you be affected if your circuit goes down? Will it cause disastrous results of just annoy you a little bit? Are remote offices able to work at all? Can they process transactions or new orders? Share essential 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. Do you operate a service where other systems communicate with yours by using an application program interface (API)? For example do other systems gain access to yours in order to calculate prices, prices, or to collect information that you serve up? What if other systems can’t connect to your office servers? Customers do not enjoy repeated outages. How long with they put up with them before looking to take their business elsewhere?
Your company is entirely Internet based. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. Your representatives would also be unable to answer calls. You are now officially out of company. Is redundancy enough? Many of the finest call centers with the best reputations already understand and use redundancy. They should consider if they have sufficient protection. Are you really getting the dependable service you need form your providers? Are you using carriers that are truly reliable? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?
You clearly have several choices. Your decision will be based on different factors including your company needs and your budget. In summary:
Sometimes redundancy is not essential to you. For example, If you are a small business, with just one office location, a single access to The Internet circuit may be sufficient. You may get by with one 50, 10 or even 5 megabyte circuit. Gigabit service and Metro Ethernet options seem expensive. If you are in a lit building, however, they can be less than you think. Look into it. The availability of circuits and your location determine prices; speak with one of our engineers to learn what your best options are.
You will need higher speed access to The Internet if you have a medium sized business in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Your options are Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and higher speed circuits. Multiple circuits utilizing multiple providers would, ideally, provide you with maximum 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. Availability and costs vary. Your specific location will determine what options you have. Please speak with one of our experts to find out what those are and how we can meet your needs.
Businesses with many places face the greatest risk for failure. They need redundant circuits. Having several providers would afford extra protection. You can decrease risk during downtime by having redundant equipment as well. Take a careful look at Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers and gigabit Internet providers. Research other high-speed access to The Internet circuit providers also and make an informed decision. The correct combination of providers and services can keep your company running smoothly and efficiently.
For businesses that fit this description, it is essential to have gigabit Internet circuits, point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits and Metro Ethernet Internet circuits. Redundant hardware and redundant circuits will, for these businesses, ensure the greatest uptime. Be sure the circuits are from different providers. You need enough bandwidth. The bandwidth must be adequate to handle spikes in usage with no slowdowns or interruptions. The hardware and circuits you choose must both be able to support the following: a great number of concurrent, speedy connections.
Do not risk having failing circuits or not enough bandwidth. You must select the single circuit or multiple circuits that can meet your demands and stay within your budget. There is tremendous pressure on you to choose the best combination of circuits and hardware.
Our expert engineers will review your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. We will look at your current usage, demand levels and scope out a design to give you the resources you need while keeping your company up and running at a reasonable cost.
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.