These days, companies in Pittsburgh count on reliable access to The Internet as the lifeblood of their organization. All companies depend on reliable and quick Internet access. This is true irrespective of how large or small the company.
Our dependence on access to The net will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
From email messaging to information sharing, e-commerce to archiving data, and voice over IP to video chat, the web is omnipresent. What is the best fix to meet your requirements? Can a cable modem suffice? It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Would Gigabit Internet suffice? What is best for your business in Pittsburgh? Will your company needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg access to The net or 100 Meg Internet access point?
You must, before selecting a service, assess the actual needs of your business. Is the web only used for web surfing and email? Is real time data connection with cloud servers important to your organization? Are you hosting the data in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that remote places depend upon?
What happens if you have an outage in your high-speed Internet? What about the downtime that results? Can your organization afford that? Is the absence of uptime detrimental? You must answer questions like these so you can make a purchase that actually meets your needs
High-speed Internet access is required by all businesses. Before you choose your broadband internet, look at the costs and benefits. Performing this analysis is an important step in picking the right one for your organization. Don’t be distracted by terminology. While you may hear service providers throw out words and phrases like:
… be sure not to forget what capability and technical solutions meet your business’s specific needs.
Companies in Pittsburgh need access to the net for their employees. Some companies may need it only for a few people and others may need it for the entire workforce. Third party applications, organization research or development and e-commerce are just some of the ways the internet may be needed.
Your best course of action may be determined by the size of your work force. If you only have a few workers, you may be fine with a smaller Internet circuit such as a 5 or 10 megabyte. You should consider more than that if you have more workers. Also keep in mind whether your workers need to access the net at the same time.
If your employees are merely accessing an intranet system with limited graphics and video, your need for high-speed Internet may be reduced. 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 perform backups at your company? 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.
Are you using a service such as DropBox or Google drive 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.
Are you interested in high-speed company Internet? Depending on where you are located, you may want to look into the viability of gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet. They are usually contained in “lit buildings” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that have already been wired by a carrier. If you’d like to install high-speed Internet in your office, you should know that it might be more affordable than you realize.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. In fact, obtaining high-speed Internet access with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet can often take 30 days or less depending upon 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? Are you a retail company hosting the POS system for thousands of chain stores? Are you an attorney with offices multiple cities or states? Do you have one office hosting data for several locations?
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. If the net connection is interrupted, those people cannot get their work done. Are you picking an intranet solution that provides reliability and stability for your multiple, simultaneous connections from various sites?
A cost friendly 10 Meg circuit or even a cable modem may satisfy the needs of a business with a single office that needs to surf the web. Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable for the headquarters where high-speed access to The Internet is important. While all offer high speeds, they also need to be capable of supporting multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would likely not provide the necessary support.
Bringing in a less-expensive circuit like a cable modem often comes with a price. You may have to share bandwidth in order to secure that low monthly rate. During peak hours, your connection may slow down, even though you subscribe to a cable modem with a thirty-megabyte connection. Many cable operators can only deliver a certain amount of bandwidth in a community. Buildings, offices and tenants within the buildings all must share that amount of bandwidth, whatever it may be. 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. Is getting 7 when you expect 30 a problem?
Some providers offer customers dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your organization. The presence of numerous buildings and tenants should have no effect on your speed. You should receive full capacity of your circuits no matter what the time of day.
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. If you want to reach gigabit speeds from your business out to the internet, you can by using a gigabit Internet provider.
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.
You can’t control everything. Even with the superior Internet bandwidth products that some carriers offer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, problems arise and circuits can fail. You must ask yourself: “how do I lessen the chance of an outage? ”
Redundant circuits may be the answer for you.
Essentially, there are two different ways to look at redundancy.
With the first kind, you receive several circuits but they all come from the same carrier. In this situation, the redundancy helps protect you from port issues or physical line issues. If that carrier has a wide reaching outage or there is a line broken or damaged outside of your building, both circuits may go down. You get some protection, but also some risk.
Bringing in circuits using two distinct providers is the second form of circuit redundancy. You may want your circuits to appear and act as if they are one and come from the same source. If so you can use IP address allocations and advanced routers to do so. Truthfully, they are entirely separate. They are redundant and exist in case one of them fails. While circuit redundancy in general is a good idea, diversity redundancy by using different carriers, offers far better protection. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
When considering redundant circuits and providers, try to be sure that the carriers you look at in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 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. 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. 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 to your company if you do not have reliable access to The net will be far greater than you may realize. Consider the following:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your 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 will happen to the strength and quality of that call? Are calls dropped? Will you sound muffled?
Your office is the center of your company. 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, depend on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. What if your circuit fails? Is it simply an irritation or a catastrophe? Can meaningful work be conducted at your remote offices? What about new orders? 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. Perhaps you operate a service where other systems communicate with yours via an API to calculate freight prices, commodity prices, collect current weather data or receive any other information that you serve up. What if you have server problems and they are unable to connect to you? Customers will only take so many repeated outages. How long with they remain with your company?
Your business is completely dependent on the net. If your circuits go down, you cannot make calls. No calls could be answered either. You are now officially out of business. For competent call centers that already use and understand the problems that can arise, is redundancy enough? Are the providers that you are using reliable enough? Is the quality of service sufficient? Are your calls clear and reliable?
You have no shortage of options. Your business budget and needs will play a large part in your decision-making. Essentially:
Sometimes redundancy is not crucial to you. For example, If you are a small company, with just one office location, a single Internet access circuit may be adequate. You may get by with one 50, 10 or even 5 megabyte circuit. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.
Mid sized companies with a single office in Pittsburgh, need higher speed access to The Internet. Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and other higher-speed Internet circuits are your options. In a perfect scenario, multiple circuits from different providers will give you the most redundancy. Achieving this may not be as costly as you first thought. For example, you may use 2 fifty meg circuits instead of 1 one hundred meg circuit. As a reminder; availability and costs may vary. In order to find out the options available for you, in your location, you need to speak with one of our seasoned experts.
What companies have the highest risk for failure; those with multiple sites. Redundant circuits are a necessity. Multiple carriers would be great. You can minimize the risk of downtime at if you also have redundant equipment like routers or switches. Before you make a decision here too, do your research. Look closely into Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. The right mix can help. If you can figure out the best combination of providers and services for your company, you will benefit.
If you fall into this group, you must have Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet circuits and point-to-point High-speed Internet circuits. In order to maximize and protect your uptime, you must have redundancy. You should have redundant circuits from multiple carriers in addition to redundant hardware. 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. Be sure to have the right circuits and hardware. They both must be able to support multiple, fast, concurrent connections.
The risk of insufficient bandwidth or failing circuits is tremendous. Your ideal single circuit or multiple circuits should stay within your budget while still meeting your demands. Choosing the right combination of hardware and circuits can be complicated and confusing.
Our expert engineers will review your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. Our experts will examine your current usage and demand. We are going to then generate a design that gives you the resources you need while keeping your company up and running at a reasonable cost.
You can complete the contact form on the right side of this page by clicking here. If you would prefer, please call our office to set up an appointment for an assessment. It can take less than 48 hours to complete your assessment.