The lifeblood of Oshkosh, Wisconsin companies doing business in the current environment depends on reliable access to The web. All companies, big and small, need fast and reliable access to The Internet.
access to The Internet will become increasingly important to us in the coming months and years. Our dependence on access to The web will only grow as time goes on.
From video conferencing to voice over IP, email to data sharing and data archiving to Internet commerce, the web is everywhere you look. What solution bet fits your needs? Will a cable modem be sufficient? Your needs may point to Metro Ethernet as a solution. Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. A 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point: what is right for your business in Oshkosh, Wisconsin?
You must, before selecting a service, assess the actual needs of your organization. Perhaps the internet is only used for a few things such as email communication or surfing the web. Will real-time data connection with servers in the cloud be the primary use of the internet? There may be remote sites that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Have you thought about what will happen to your company if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? Can your business afford the downtime? Is uptime essential to the success of your business? These types of questions must be answered before you make purchase anything.
High-speed access to the web is something all companies need. Deciding on the right broadband internet is not easy. It requires a thorough cost-benefit analysis. While many providers like to spout technical terminologies such as:
… the actual issue is knowing what technology and capability can satisfy your needs.
Workers for most companies in Oshkosh, Wisconsin have some need to access the web during the course of their job. Whether it is for organization research, to order supplies or to use third-party applications, the web is required.
The number of employees you have may determine your best solution. A five or ten megabyte Internet circuit may be all you need if employ a small workforce. If you have 50 employees who are using the internet simultaneously, you may need 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. When employees are often downloading images, videos and documents, however, the need for speed increases significantly.
Are you performing backups? You may need to support simultaneous connections to the web in order to sync your backup data. If you conduct remote backups from every workstation, which is advisable, this will be important.
Do you use a file-sharing service? Perhaps you use Google drive, DropBox or a different service? 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.
Depending on where you are, you may want to look into high-speed organization access to The Internet such as Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet. These can usually be found in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. Choosing to add high-speed Internet to your office is a tough decision but it can be less expensive and easier than you think.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet may provide you with high-speed access to The Internet in thirty days or less, depending on availability.
Your organization may host its own servers. Do they run websites APIs or data feeds for external offices? Are your business headquarters with a hosted application connected to fifty or more satellite offices? Are you a retail company with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different locations?
When data, programs, or information is hosted centrally, those outside your office must gain access. Those people are not able to do their work if the net connection fails or is unreliable. Are you choosing an intranet solution that is sufficiently reliable and stable to support multiple simultaneous connections from varied locations?
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. High-speed dedicated circuits, Metro Ethernet or gigabit Ethernet are advisable for company headquarters. Multiple diverse connections require support, in addition to high speed. A cable modem would not be able to accomplish this.
Bringing in a less-expensive circuit like a cable modem often comes with a price. You may save money on your monthly bill but the bandwidth you get must be shared among many people. During peak hours, your connection may slow down, even though you subscribe to a cable modem with a thirty-megabyte connection. Cable operators differ but many have prescribed limits on the bandwidth amount that they can deliver within a set community. Whatever that amount of bandwidth is, it branches into all buildings in the community and to all tenants in those buildings. During crucial working hours, you may not get to the 30-meg speed you have been capped at. Is it a problem if you get a quarter or even half of the speed you expected?
Some providers offer customers 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.
Five Meg, ten Meg, fifty Meg and 100 Meg circuits of guaranteed bandwidth are available with Metro Ethernet. With gigabit Internet providers, you can reach gigabit speeds in your office out to the net.
The providers in this situation deliver high-speed to a particular building in sufficient quantity to split their circuit among various tenants. Of course, they must ensure that they each get the specific amount of their contracted speed.
Oshkosh, Wisconsin has some providers that offer exceptional Internet bandwidth products and services. However, circuits can still go down and cause disruption. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?
The answer is redundant circuits.
There are, in essence, two types of redundancy.
The first is where you get multiple circuits from one carrier. Redundant circuits help protect you from certain failures including physical line issues, port issues within routers, and others. 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. There is some protection that comes with this but there is risk as well.
The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from 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. In reality, they are completely separate and redundant to each other. You will get more substantial protection from this diversity redundancy. 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.
When considering redundant circuits and providers, try to be sure that the carriers you look at in Oshkosh, Wisconsin have different physical geographic routes or pathways. Doing so will maximize redundancy. Basically this means that you want your circuits to enter your building on different sides or paths. They would be on outside phone poles or underground conduits in different directions and leading to different places. 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.
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. Think about the following situations:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. Any of these tenants may be taking many calls, conducting huge downloads or streaming video during your regular office hours. As available bandwidth shrinks, what will happen to your calls? What about phone call quality? Will you lose calls? Inaudible (choppy) to your customers?
Your office is the center of your business. You may be a law firm that does file sharing or a retailer operating a POS system. All of your sites, whether 2 or 2000, count on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. What will happen if your circuit crashes? 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? Share essential data? Be sure you understand your requirements fully before choosing a solution. Maybe your software company runs a hosted solution. Maybe that hosted solution is used by hundreds of your 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 other systems can’t connect to your office servers? If you have repeated outages, how long will they remain a customer?
Your organization is entirely Internet based. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. You are now officially out of organization. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Make sure your providers are as reliable as possible. Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
You have no shortage of options. The needs and budget of your company will both affect your choices. Essentially:
Sometimes redundancy is not important to you. For example, If you are a small organization, with just one office location, a single Internet access 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. Prices will vary. They are based on your location and circuit availability; speak with our engineers to learn your best options.
Mid sized companies with a single office in Oshkosh, need higher speed access to The net. Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet and other higher speed Internet circuits are options to consider. Ideally, you want to have the greatest redundancy. You can achieve this by using multiple circuits from different providers. But can you do this without doubling costs? Sometimes, yes. For example, you may use 2 fifty meg circuits instead of 1 one hundred meg circuit. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.
Companies with different sites, whether 5 or 50, are at the highest risk. Redundancy is extremely important to them. Different providers are desirable. Redundant routers, switches and other equipment can also be helpful to lessen downtime during a problem. 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. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your business run as efficiently as possible.
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. If you want to ensure your valuable uptime, have redundant circuits from multiple carriers as well as redundant hardware. Having plenty of bandwidth will help avoid interruptions or decreased speed that sometimes occurs during spikes in usage. 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.
Your business faces great risk of less than adequate bandwidth and failing circuits. You need to have the right circuit or circuits to meet your demands while staying within your budget. Choosing the right mix of circuits and hardware is a daunting task.
Our engineers can help. We are going to analyze your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. You want your company to run smoothly. We are going to look at your current usage levels and demand levels and design a plan that meets your needs at a cost that makes sense for you.
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.