Because of today’s environment, companies in Redding depend on the net. Reliable access to the internet is the lifeblood of their business. Fortune 500 companies to small companies and everything in between, depend on reliable and fast access to The net.
Our dependence on Internet access will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
Our uses of the web reach far and wide. From data sharing, video calls, and shopping to VOIP and email, the net has a broad presence. What is the right solution for your requirements? Can a cable modem suffice? Do you need Metro Ethernet? Is Gigabit Internet right for you? What does your Redding, California company need? Does it require 10 Meg access to The net, a 100 Meg access to The Internet point, a 50 Meg circuit or a 5 Meg circuit?
Prior to selecting a service, your business must figure out its needs. Is the internet only used for web surfing and email? Is real time data connection with cloud servers important to your company? You may be hosting the data in Redding, California and remote sites rely on this.
What happens if you have an outage in your high-speed Internet? Can your business afford the downtime? Is uptime essential to the success of your business? You must answer these questions before you buy.
High-speed access to the net is something all companies need. Deciding on the right broadband internet is not easy. It requires a thorough cost-benefit analysis. Many service providers toss out terms such as:
… do not lose sight of the real issues: what are the capabilities and technical solutions you need to best serve your company?
Companies in Redding, California 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 net may be needed.
Your best course of action may be determined by the size of your work force. A 5 or 10 megabyte Internet circuit may be perfect if you only have a few employees. 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.
Do your employees primarily use an intranet system? If so, you may not need much high-speed Internet service. On the other hand, if your company requires that its employees download many documents or images and videos, Internet speed becomes more important.
Are you performing routine backups? Synchronizing your backup data after doing remote backups from every desk requires you to support simultaneous connections out to the web.
Does your company require employees to share files using a service like Google drive or DropBox? When people save a file, it gets pushed to the cloud. The file is then synched with other people’s computers. Enough bandwidth is required to support this function along with every other service.
Organization high-speed access to The web may interest you. Depending on your location, you may have options such as gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in Redding. Carriers have already wired these buildings. 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. Also, securing high-speed Internet access using gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet often takes less than 30 days, depending on its availability.
Does your organization host its own servers running websites, APIs or data feeds for other offices or companies outside of your own four walls? Are your business headquarters with a hosted application connected to fifty or more satellite offices? Are you a retail business with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? You may be a law firm hosting data for three or four different offices.
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. If the web connection is interrupted or fails, those people are unable to accomplish any work. 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.
A cost friendly 10 Meg circuit or even a cable modem may satisfy the needs of a organization with a single office that needs to surf the web. 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 likely not provide the necessary support.
In many cases, installing an inexpensive cable modem comes at a price. Your low monthly bill may mean that the bandwidth is shared among multiple tenants. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper speeds during peak hours. Often, within a given community, cable companies may only deliver a particular amount of bandwidth. Whatever that amount of bandwidth is, it branches into all buildings in the community and to all tenants in those buildings. With a 30-megabyte connection, you may not get to that speed during the working day. Do you care if you only get 6 when you were set up to expect 30?
Other carriers do offer dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. With these, bandwidth belongs to you and your business only; no sharing. Regardless of other tenants in your building or neighboring buildings, you should receive the full capacity of your circuit.
Five Meg, ten Meg, fifty Meg and 100 Meg circuits of guaranteed bandwidth are available with Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet providers offer gigabit speeds from your office 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.
Circuits can go down in Redding, California even though certain providers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. You must ask yourself: “how do I lessen the chance of an outage? ”
Consider redundant circuits.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
The first kind of redundancy exists when one carrier provides one customer with many circuits. When there are problems with a physical line or a port or other failures, it can be helpful to have redundant circuits. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. There is some protection that comes with this but there is risk as well.
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. Diversity redundancy offers far greater protection. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
You should look for redundant circuits from providers in Redding that do not have the same physical geographic pathways, in order to get the most redundancy. In other words, try to obtain circuits entering the building from different sides of the building. The circuits would be established either underground or on telephone poles and would be set up in different directions and lead to different offices. 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.
The cost to your company if you do not have reliable Internet access will be far greater than you may realize. Consider the following:
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 organization that perform large file downloads or stream many videos? As the amount of available bandwidth diminishes, what will happen to your phone calls? How will the quality of that phone call be affected? Are calls lost or dropped? Will your voice be inaudible? Will you have difficulty hearing the other end?
Whether you are a law firm doing file sharing, an accounting practice sharing databases or a retailer operating a distributed point-of-sale system, your office is the hub for your enterprise. All of your sites, whether 2 or 2000, depend on your primary Internet connection to access and retrieve data. What if your circuit fails? Would it annoy you or destroy you? Is work even possible at your other places? Can they take or process any orders at all? Dispense and receive data? Picking the right a solution can be difficult. Before doing so, be sure you fully understand your requirements. Maybe your software company runs a hosted solution. Maybe that hosted solution is used by hundreds of your customers. Do you operate a service where other systems talk to yours by using an application program interface (API)? For example do other systems gain access to yours in order to calculate rates, prices, or to collect information that you serve up? What if you have server problems and they are unable to connect to you? If you have repeated outages, how long will they remain a customer?
Your organization is 100% reliant on the internet to properly function. No outbound calls can be made should your circuits go down. Your reps have no way of answering calls, if they even know they are coming in. Your organization is basically done with. For competent call centers that already use and understand the problems that can arise, is redundancy enough? Are your providers sufficiently reliable? Do you consistently get quality service that provides clear and reliable calls?
You clearly have many options. Your budget, as well as the needs of your company, will help drive your decisions. To recap:
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 Internet access circuit of 5, 10 or 50 meg. Is your building lit? If so, find out about gigabit or Metro Ethernet services. They may be reasonably priced options. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.
You have a midsized company in Redding; you will surely need higher-speed Internet. You may choose between gigabit Internet or Metro Ethernet. You may also look into other higher-speed Internet circuits. Multiple circuits utilizing multiple providers would, ideally, provide you with maximum redundancy. You may be able to achieve this in a manner that will not break the bank. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. To repeat, availability and prices vary. 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 places, whether 5 or 50, are at the highest risk. Redundancy is crucial. Multiple providers would be great. Also, redundant equipment such as switches and routers in your facility can minimize the risk of downtime. Look at all of your options: Ethernet access services, gigabit Internet providers, Metro Ethernet providers and other high-speed circuit providers. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your business 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. Redundant hardware and redundant circuits will, for these businesses, ensure the greatest uptime. Be sure the circuits are from different providers. Having plenty of bandwidth will help avoid interruptions or decreased speed that sometimes occurs during spikes in usage. The hardware and circuits you choose must both be able to support the following: a great number of concurrent, speedy connections.
Insufficient bandwidth and failing circuits are present tremendous risk to your company. You need to have the right circuit or circuits to meet your demands while staying within your budget. Choosing the right combination of hardware and circuits can be complicated and confusing.
Our engineers will analyze your needs and requirements and develop 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 business up and running at a reasonable cost.
If you would like to arrange for an assessment, please click here to complete the contact information form to the right. You can call our office as well. It can take less than 48 hours to complete your assessment.