Reliable Internet access is the lifeblood of Saginaw, Michigan companies and their company. The company functions of every company, whether it is a small organization 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.
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 net is certainly ubiquitous. What is the best solution for you? Will a cable modem be adequate? It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet? Does your Saginaw business need a 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg access to The web, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point?
Before choosing an adequate or appropriate service, you must decide what your organization really needs. Is Internet use limited to website surfing or emailing only? Is real time data connection with cloud servers important to your company? There may be remote locations that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Saginaw.
How would an outage to your high-speed Internet affect your company? Will your business suffer from the lull? Is your success reliant on uptime? You must answer these questions before you buy.
Plainly stated, companies require high-speed Internet access. When picking the correct broadband internet, balancing the costs and benefits to your organization is imperative. While you are likely to hear some service providers toss around terms such as:
… the real issue is understanding what capability and technical solutions best meet your needs.
Workers for most companies in Saginaw have some need to access the web during the course of their job. Whether it is to communicate with shippers, do research or place orders, Internet access is required.
Perhaps the size of your work force may determine the solution that best fits your needs. A five or ten megabyte Internet circuit may be all you need if employ a small workforce. If you have a larger workforce, you may want to consider more. This is especially true if they all need to use the internet 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, when they are frequently downloading documents, images and videos, that need for speed increases drastically.
Do you routinely backup? 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.
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? When people save a file, it gets pushed to the cloud. The file is then synched with other people’s computers. You need to have sufficient bandwidth to support this function while also supporting every other service.
You may consider high-speed business access to The net if you location warrants it. Gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet may be viable options for you. “Lit buildings” that have already been wired by a carrier, are commonly the site for these. Adding this high-speed Internet to your office may be surprisingly affordable and easy.
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. You can actually get high-speed access with gigabit Internet or even Metro Ethernet quickly. It often takes only 30 days or less, depending on availability.
Ask yourself this: Does we host our own servers to run APIs, websites and data feeds to external offices or organization premises? Are your corporate headquarters with a hosted application utilized by 50 branch offices? Are you a retail company hosting the POS system for thousands of chain stores? Are you a legal practice hosting the data for three sites?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. 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.
A cable modem or fairly cheap 10-megabyte circuit may be enough in certain scenarios. For example, these may meet the needs of a single office surfing the web. High-speed Internet access is advisable for the headquarters. Gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuit is recommended. Multiple diverse connections require support, in addition to high speed. A cable modem would probably not be enough.
In many cases, installing an inexpensive cable modem comes at a price. There may be a lower monthly rate, but bandwidth is usually shared with many tenants. 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. The 30-meg speed you are capped out sounds good but it is possible that you will never reach that speed during organization hours. If you expect 30 but only get 6, will you have problems?
You can find a carrier who can provide dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. If you want your very own bandwidth that is not used by anyone else, you should consider this. No matter who is in the building or what buildings surround you, you should always run at full speed.
Metro Ethernet provides guaranteed bandwidth in increments as follows: 5, 10, 50 and 100 Meg circuits. You can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit Internet providers.
In these cases, the carriers deliver high-speed to the building in sufficient quantity that they can then split their circuit to various tenants while guaranteeing each tenant is receiving their contracted speeds.
While certain providers offer superior Internet bandwidth products in Saginaw, Michigan, the reality is that it is possible for a circuit to go down. The question then becomes, “how do I minimize my chance of an outage? ”
You may be a candidate for 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. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. This offers some protection and assurance but does not eliminate all threats.
You can also achieve redundancy by utilizing different providers to bring in and establish 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. Truthfully, they are entirely separate. They are redundant and exist in case one of them fails. Diversity redundancy provides greater assurance, comfort and protection. In the event that one carrier goes down, the other will still be alive.
The carriers you choose for your redundant circuits should have different physical pathways in Saginaw. This is an important consideration when trying to obtain 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. Ideally, the circuits will be going in different directions and toward various central organization spaces or data centers. 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 of dependable access to The web pales in comparison to the cost of unreliable access. Consider these scenarios:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. It is possible that during normal company hours, those tenants might be downloading large files or watching continuous videos. They might be getting a lot of phone calls. As they use more bandwidth, there is less for available to meet your requirements. What will happen to your phone calls? What about the quality of your calls? Will you lose calls? Inaudible (choppy) to your customers?
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. Every single one of your offices, stores and locations rely on you and your primary Internet connection to retrieve data. What happens in the event of a circuit failure? Would it annoy you or destroy you? Are remote offices able to work at all? Process or take new orders? Circulate necessary data? Do you know what your company needs? Be sure to fully understand your requirements. It will help you choose the correct 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 these other systems have difficulty connecting your servers? How long will your customers tolerate repeated outages?
Maybe your company depends entirely on the web. No calls can go out if your circuits fail. No calls could be answered either. You are now officially out of organization. While many of the most reputable call centers are already aware and using the advantages of redundancy, is it sufficiently meeting their needs? Are the providers that you are using reliable enough? You should be getting high quality service that ensures your calls are consistently clear and reliable.
Obviously, there are a variety of choices. Your decision will be based on different factors including your organization needs and your budget. Essentially:
Sometimes redundancy is not vital to you. For example, If you are a small company, 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 change based on your location and the availability of circuits. Please speak with our engineers about what options best suit your needs.
Having a medium or mid-sized company in Saginaw, Michigan requires that you have higher-speed access to the internet. Your choices include: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or other high-speed circuits. Optimally, multiple providers and multiple circuits will give you the most redundancy. You can sometimes achieve this without doubling costs. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Availability and costs vary. You should speak with our experts to learn the options for your particular location.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. Redundant circuits are essential. Varied providers are optimal. You can minimize the risk of downtime at if you also have redundant equipment like routers or switches. Here also, examine the Ethernet access services, gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet providers. Take a careful look at other high-speed access to The net circuit providers before choosing the right one. Finding the best combination of services, providers and equipment can go a long way toward helping your company run as efficiently as possible.
If you can place yourself in this category, it is essential that you have Metro Ethernet, point-to-point circuits and gigabit Internet circuits. Having redundant hardware as well as redundant circuits from different providers will ensure your needed uptime. You need to provide sufficient bandwidth to handle usage spikes without slowdowns or interruptions. 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. You must select the single circuit or multiple circuits that can meet your demands and stay within your budget. There is tremendous pressure on you to choose the best combination of circuits and hardware.
Our engineers can analyze your needs and create a free action plan for you. We will formulate a design or plan based partly on your current usage and demand levels. We are going to create something cost effective that gives you the resources your company needs, while keeping it running smoothly.
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. We do assessments quickly. It can take as little as 48 hours to complete your analysis.