Today’s environment demands that companies in Novi, Michigan have reliable Internet service in order to run their company. The company functions of every company, whether it is a small business or on the Fortune 500, from Fortune 500, depends upon fast and reliable access to The Internet.
In the months and years ahead, people and businesses will become more reliant on internet access.
The web has a significant presence in our lives. From email to information sharing, data archiving to e-commerce, and VOIP to video conferencing, the web is certainly ubiquitous. What is the best fix for your requirements? Is a cable modem sufficient? Metro Ethernet? Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. Will your Novi business needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg access to The Internet or 100 Meg access to The Internet point?
You must, before selecting a service, assess the actual needs of your business. Perhaps the internet is only used for a few things such as email communication or surfing the web. Is it used to network with cloud servers? Do remote sites rely on you hosting the data in Novi, Michigan?
What if you have a disruption in your high-speed Internet? Can your company afford the downtime? How much uptime is essential to your company? You must answer these questions before you buy.
Speaking broadly, all companies need high-speed access to the internet. When picking the correct broadband, balancing the costs and benefits to your business is imperative. While many providers throw around terminologies such as:
… you must not lose sight of the real issue, which is understanding what technical solutions best meet your needs.
Workers for most companies in Novi have some need to access the internet during the course of their job. Whether it is to speak with shippers, do research or place orders, access to The web is required.
The number of workers you have may be the factor that drives your decision. If you have a handful of employees, a 5 or 10 Meg Internet circuit may be sufficient. If you have a larger workforce, you may want to consider more. This is especially true if they all need to use the web simultaneously.
High-speed Internet may become less important if the majority of your employees primarily use an intranet system with limited graphics and video. If your company functions demand the downloading of documents and images or videos on a regular basis, speed becomes a must more important issue.
Do you backup information? When you do remote backups from every workstation, which you should, you must support multiple and simultaneous connections to the web in order to sync 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? The saved files go to the cloud and are then synchronized or “shared” with other people’s computers. Enough bandwidth is required to support this function along with every other service.
Your organization location may cause you to think about high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. These can usually be found in Novi, Michigan 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.
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. 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.
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 corporate headquarters with a hosted application utilized by 50 branch offices? Does your office host the point of sale (POS) system for every single store in a large retail chain? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different places?
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. For those people, no Internet connection means no work gets done. 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.
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. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. The support you need could not be provided by a cable modem.
Bringing in a cable modem, which seems to save money, may actually come at a price. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple 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. Cable companies are known to limit or predetermine the amount of bandwidth available for delivery in any particular community. Buildings, offices and tenants within the buildings all must share that amount of bandwidth, whatever it may be. During crucial working hours, you may not get to the 30-meg speed you have been capped at. If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?
Some carriers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. In this scenario, the bandwidth is fully allocated to you and your company or business. No one else uses it. 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. Gigabit speeds from your office to the internet can be reached if you use 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.
The truth is that circuits can go down in Novi, Michigan even though some providers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. The question then becomes, “how do I minimize my chance of an outage? ”
Try using redundant circuits.
There are, in reality, two kinds of redundancy.
With the first kind, you receive several circuits but they all come from the same carrier. These redundant circuits help protect from certain failures, for example, router port issues or physical line trouble. 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. While offering some protection, it is not without risk.
The second way to set up circuit redundancy is by using two different carriers to bring in your circuits. By using IP address allocations and certain routers, you can bind your connections. By doing this, it appears and behaves as a single circuit. But, you know that they are actually separate and redundant. This is called diversity redundancy and offers more protection that the first. In the event that one carrier goes down, the other will still be alive.
You should look for redundant circuits from carriers in Novi, Michigan 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. 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 sites. By doing this, if there is a significant problem such as a fire at a data center, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.
Even though Internet access comes with a cost, you will save money if you make sure it is dependable. Unreliable access will end up costing you more in the long run. Please consider these situations:
The carrier you use for your cable modem also provides circuits for a dozen or more tenants in the office building. What if any or all of those tenants are huge call centers taking in a massive volume of phone calls, are company that perform large file downloads or stream many videos? As the amount of accessible bandwidth decreases, what happens to your needs? What happens to your phone calls? What happens to the quality of that phone call? Are calls dropped? Will the calls be choppy?
Regardless of whether you are part of a legal practice and your firm does file sharing, or an accounting practice sharing databases, your office is the central point or hub of your organization. All of your locations, whether 2 or 2000, depend on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. What happens in the event of a circuit failure? Is it just irritating? Is it going to cause tremendous problems? Can meaningful work be conducted at your remote offices? Process or take new orders? Circulate necessary data? Before choosing a solution, be sure to assess and really understand what your company requires. 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. You may find that they are unable to reach or connect with your organization servers. Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?
Maybe your company depends entirely on the internet. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. In addition, they will be unable to answer incoming calls. Your company is basically done with. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Are the providers that you are using reliable enough? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?
It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your choices will largely rely on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your company. In summary:
You are probably not thinking about redundancy if you have a small company with a single location. In this case, you can probably get by with a single access to The Internet circuit of 5, 10 or 50 meg. 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. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.
Having a medium or mid-sized company in Novi, Michigan requires that you have higher-speed access to the web. Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet and other higher speed Internet circuits are options to consider. In a perfect world, you will achieve maximum redundancy by utilizing multiple carriers to provide and service different circuits. Achieving this may not be as costly as you first thought. For example, one 100-megabyte circuit may cost more than two smaller 50-megabyte circuits. Availability and costs vary. Call one of our experts to learn what is available in your specific area.
Businesses with many locations face the greatest risk for failure. They need redundant circuits. Multiple providers would be great. You can increase redundancy with switches or routers. Having redundant equipment can also minimize risk. As always, take a careful look and choose the right Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed access to The net circuit providers. The right combination of services and carriers can positively impact the efficiency of your organization.
For companies falling in this category, gigabit Internet circuits, Metro Ethernet Internet circuits and point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits are essential. You will want to have the greatest protection of your uptime. To accomplish this you must have redundancy: redundant circuits from multiple providers and redundant hardware for your system. The last thing you want is interruptions or slowdowns affecting your organization. You must provide enough bandwidth to avoid these pitfalls that sometimes occur during sudden usage spikes. Your goal is to have hardware and circuits that are more than capable of providing support to a significant number of fast and simultaneous connections.
There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. The circuit or circuits you have must stay within the parameters of your budget while still meeting your organization needs. The pressure involved in selecting the proper mix of hardware and circuits can be overwhelming.
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 demand levels and current usage. We are going to then design a plan that keeps your costs reasonable while meeting your demand for a smoothly run company.
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 less than 48 hours to complete your assessment.