Today’s environment demands that companies in Rapid City, South Dakota have reliable Internet service in order to run their company. The company functions of every company, whether it is a small company or on the Fortune 500, from Fortune 500, relies on fast and reliable access to The web.
Our reliance on access to the net will become greater in the near and distant future.
From email to data sharing, video conferencing to VoIP, and data archiving to Internet commerce, the web is ubiquitous. What can best meet your needs? Perhaps a cable modem is all you need. Do you need Metro Ethernet? Would Gigabit Internet suffice? What is best for your organization in Rapid City? Will your company needs be met with a 50 Meg circuit, a 5 Meg circuit, 10 Meg Internet access or 100 Meg Internet access point?
The needs of your particular organization must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Will web surfing and email be your primary use of the web? Is connecting with cloud servers and sharing real time data the main use of the internet? Perhaps you, in Rapid City, South Dakota, are hosting the data and remote sites depend upon this.
Have you thought about what happens to your business if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? Can your organization afford the downtime? Is uptime essential? Ask yourself these questions before making any purchases. The answers will help you determine what is right for you.
High-speed access to the internet is something all companies need. An analysis of the costs and benefits should be done prior to choosing the broadband that is correct for your business. You will hear providers use terms like:
… the actual issue is knowing what technology and capability can satisfy your needs.
At any company in Rapid City some employees, if not all employees, need some type of access to the internet if they are to properly perform their job duties. Whether it is for company research, to order supplies or to use third-party applications, the net is required.
The best solution may depend upon how many employees you have. An Internet circuit of 5 -10 megabytes might be enough for your business if you only have a few people working for you. 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.
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, Internet speed becomes dramatically more important when they are required to regularly download things like documents or videos.
Are you performing backups? Simultaneous connections to the web, which you need in order to sync your backup data, require support. If you conduct remote backups from every workstation, which you definitely should, this will be important.
Does your business use a file sharing service? DropBox? Google drive? 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.
High-speed company access to The net like Metro Ethernet and gigabit Internet may be viable options for you depending on your location. These can usually be found in Rapid City in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. It may be shock you to know that installing high-speed access to The net may not be particularly expensive or inconvenient.
While bringing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be an expensive proposition, bringing that connection to a suite within the building is not. Depending on availability, it is often possible to obtain high-speed access to The web with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet in 30 days or less.
Ask yourself this: Does we host our own servers to run APIs, websites and data feeds to external offices or business premises? Do fifty or so branch offices need access to a hosted application at your company headquarters? Are you a retail business with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? Are you a law firm? Do you host data for three or more external locations?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. Those people are not able to do their work if the net connection fails or is unreliable. When deciding on the right intranet solution for your organization, ask yourself: Is the solution going to adequately support simultaneous and multiple connections from my 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 the headquarters, high-speed Internet access including Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable. While fast access to The net is and important, they must also have the capability to handle assorted simultaneous connections. 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. While the monthly rate is lower, the bandwidth is generally shared among other tenants. 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. While you may be capped at a 30 Meg speed, you may never be able to reach that speed during business hours. Will there be trouble if your expectation is set at 30 but you only get 8 or 10?
Guaranteed bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth are solutions that some providers offer. In this scenario, the bandwidth is fully allocated to you and your company or organization. No one else uses it. Notwithstanding the existence of tenants, offices or buildings in the area, you should have the full capability of your circuits at all times.
You can receive guaranteed bandwidth with Metro Ethernet. You can receive it in increments of five, 10, 50 or one hundred megabyte circuits. With gigabit Internet providers, you can reach gigabit speeds in your office out to the web.
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.
You can’t control everything. Even with the superior Internet bandwidth products that some carriers offer in Rapid City, South Dakota, problems arise and circuits can fail. In what way can you diminish the risk of an outage?
Redundant circuits may be the answer for you.
Redundancy in this situation comes in two forms.
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. While offering some protection, it is not without risk.
The second way to set up circuit redundancy is by using two different providers to bring in your circuits. Using advanced routers and IP address allocations, you can bind these connections together so that, to your users and to the public, it appears and behaves as a single circuit. Though they may appear as one, you know that they are each individual circuits and redundant to each other. Diversity redundancy, as this is called, offers you more protection that you might realize. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
For maximum redundancy, you should look for redundant circuits from different carriers with different physical geographic pathways in Rapid City. Alternatively stated, try to have your circuits enter the building on different sides from one another. The circuits would be attached to telephone poles (or underground conduits) in different directions leading to different data centers or central offices. 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.
The cost to your company if you do not have reliable Internet access will be far greater than you may realize. Consider these scenarios:
Your office uses a cable modem and, in addition to you, the carrier provides 10-15 additional tenants with circuits. Any of these tenants may be taking many calls, conducting huge downloads or streaming video during your regular office hours. As they use more bandwidth, there is less for available to meet your needs. What will happen to your phone calls? How will the caliber of the call be affected? Will calls be arbitrarily dropped? Inaudible (choppy) to your customers?
Your office is the center of your organization. You may be a law firm that does file sharing or a retailer operating a POS system. All of your locations, you may have 2, you may have 500, you may have 4, 000, depend on your main Internet connection to access and receive data. Your circuit goes down, now what will happen? Is it a mere annoyance or a catastrophic failure? How much work, if any, can be done by your remote locations? What about new orders? Circulate essential files and data? Do you know what your company needs? Be sure to fully understand your requirements. It will help you choose the correct solution. Perhaps you have hundreds of clients or customers that use a hosted solution that your software organization is running. Maybe you operate a service that allows other systems to talk to yours via API. This may be to collect miscellaneous data, calculate prices or shipping prices or other information. It is possible they will not be able to connect to your servers. How will repeated outages affect your customers? Will they remain customers?
What if your business could not function at all without the net? Maybe your company relies on it completely. What if your representatives can make no outgoing telephone calls because your circuits go down? There would be no way to answer incoming calls of people trying to reach your representatives. Basically, you are done. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Are the carriers you currently use as reliable as they should be? Are they as reliable as you need them to be? Do you consistently get quality service that provides clear and reliable calls?
Clearly, there are many choices. Your choices will largely rely on your budget, in addition to the other requirements of your company. To summarize:
A single fifty, ten or five megabyte access to The web circuit may be sufficient to meet the needs of your small organization, particularly if you have only one location and are not worried about redundancy. 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 change based on your location and the availability of circuits. Please speak with our engineers about what options best suit your needs.
You have a midsized company in Rapid City, South Dakota; you will surely need higher-speed Internet. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. Ideally, multiple circuits from multiple providers will provide you with the greatest redundancy. This may be attainable without doubling your costs. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Availability and costs vary. Speaking with one of our experts will help you determine the options available in your specific location.
The greatest risk of failure belongs to companies that have multiple places of organization or offices. They require redundant circuits. Having several providers would afford extra protection. You can decrease risk during downtime by having redundant equipment as well. Here too, take a careful look and choose the right Ethernet access services, Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed Internet access 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.
For companies falling in this category, gigabit Internet circuits, Metro Ethernet Internet circuits and point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits are essential. You must have redundant circuits for multiple providers as well as redundant hardware in your office to ensure your uptime. You need to provide sufficient bandwidth to handle usage spikes without slowdowns or interruptions. Both your hardware and circuits must be capable of supporting a vast number of simultaneous and fast connections.
The risk of insufficient bandwidth or failing circuits is tremendous. The right circuits must meet your demand while keeping you within your budget. You have to select the optimal combination of hardware and circuits, which is a daunting task.
Our engineers can help. We will analyze your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. You want your business 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.