The lifeblood of Pinellas Park, Florida companies doing business in the current environment depends on reliable access to The web. Fortune 500 companies to small companies and everything in between, rely on reliable and fast Internet access.
Our reliance on access to the net will become greater in the near and distant future.
The net is ubiquitous. From email to data sharing, archiving to commerce and VOIP to video conferencing, the internet is everywhere. What do you need? Is a cable modem sufficient? Metro Ethernet? You may need Gigabit Internet. Does your business in Pinellas Park need one of these: 10 Meg Internet access, a 100 Meg Internet access point, a 50 meg circuit or a 5 meg circuit?
Before selecting an appropriate service for your company, you must first determine what needs you are trying to satisfy. Is the internet only used for web surfing and email? Is it used for real-time data connection with cloud servers? Are you hosting data in Pinellas Park? Do remote sites depend upon you?
Have you thought about what will happen to your organization if your high-speed Internet is interrupted by an outage? How will the downtime affect your company? Is uptime essential? Prior to making any purchases, you must determine the answers to these questions.
High-speed access to The Internet is required by all businesses. An analysis of the costs and benefits should be done prior to choosing the broadband that is correct for your company. Many providers toss out terms such as:
… do not stray from the real issues. Focus on what your company’s needs are and what capabilities and technical solutions will help satisfy them.
For most companies in Pinellas Park, Florida, some or all of the employees need access to the internet. It may be needed for company research, to order office supplies or other reasons.
The number of workers you employ, may be the most important factor in your decision making process. An Internet circuit of 5 -10 megabytes might be enough for your organization if you only have a few people working for you. 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.
You may not need as much high-speed access to The net if your employees work primarily on an intranet system with limited graphics and video. However, employees who must often download documents, images and videos, need that speed.
Are you regularly performing backups? Synchronizing your backup data after doing remote backups from every desk requires you to support simultaneous connections out to the web.
Are you using a service such as DropBox or Google drive to share files? This is how a file sharing service works: You save a file. Then the file is pushed to the cloud, and is then synchronized with other people’s computers. You must have sufficient bandwidth if you are to successfully support every service including file sharing.
Your business location may cause you to think about high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. Usually, you can find these in “lit buildings” in Pinellas Park that have been previously wired by a carrier. Installing high-speed Internet may not be as difficult and expensive as you think.
The introduction of Metro Ethernet into a new building can be quite costly. However, bringing that connection into office space within that building is usually less so. Did you know that obtaining high-speed Internet access with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet can often take 30 days or less? Of course, this depends upon availability.
Does your company host its own servers running websites, APIs or data feeds for other offices or companies outside of your own four walls? Are your corporate headquarters with a hosted application utilized by 50 branch offices? Are you a retail chain hosting the POS system for 12, 000 stores? Are you a law firm hosting data for multiple office locations?
Granting access to outsiders is necessary when you host data and programs at a central location. If your Internet connection goes down, those people are unable to work. Is the intranet solution you are choosing sufficiently reliable? Is it stable enough to support simultaneous connections from different locations?
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 headquarters, Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed Internet dedicated circuits is advisable. While all offer high speeds, they also need to be capable of supporting multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would likely be insufficient.
In many cases, installing an inexpensive cable modem comes at a price. Even though you pay less money per month you must consider that the bandwidth you receive may be shared and used by multiple parties in the building. You may experience slow downs. For example, although you subscribe to a cable modem with a thirty Meg connection, it can be difficult to maintain the maximum speed during busy times and peak hours. Cable operators differ but many have prescribed limits on the bandwidth amount that they can deliver within a set 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 business day. Do you care if you only get 6 when you were set up to expect 30?
Some carriers are available who offer dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed bandwidth. With these, bandwidth belongs to you and your organization only; no sharing. The full capacity of your circuit should be attainable during all hours regardless of neighboring buildings, people or offices.
With Metro Ethernet, for example, you can receive a guaranteed bandwidth in various increments including 5 and 10 Meg circuits, and 50 and 100 Meg circuits. In your office out to the web you can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit providers
In these scenarios, providers deliver a large quantity of high-speed to a building. The quantity must be enough so that it can split the circuit and deliver to every tenant. Whatever amount has been guaranteed in each tenant’s contract is the amount they receive.
Realistically, while some providers in Pinellas Park, Florida offer excellent Internet bandwidth products, it is possible for a circuit to go down. How can you decrease the chance of an outage?
Try using redundant circuits.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
The first kind of redundancy exists when one carrier provides one customer with many circuits. Redundant circuits help protect you from certain failures including physical line issues, port issues within routers, and others. 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.
The other type of redundancy requires you to utilize circuits from different carriers. 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. This is called diversity redundancy and offers more protection that the first. When one carrier has a problem like an outage or some other failure, you have another one that works.
When considering redundant circuits and carriers, try to be sure that the carriers you look at in Pinellas Park, Florida have different physical geographic routes or pathways. Doing so will maximize redundancy. In other words, try to obtain circuits entering the building from different sides of the building. They would be on outside phone poles or underground conduits in different directions and leading to different places. If a major accident occurs or there is a fire that impedes the function of circuits in a particular region, you have redundancy in a different direction.
The cost of dependable Internet access pales in comparison to the cost of unreliable access. Please think about the following scenarios:
Are you on a cable modem and your carrier is providing circuits to dozens of other office suites in your 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? How will less available bandwidth affect your telephone calls? What happens to the quality of that phone call? Are calls dropped? Will you sound muffled?
You may be an accounting firm that shares databases, a retail chain company utilizing a point of sale system or a law practice sharing files. Regardless of the specifics, your office is the hub for your enterprise. Every single one of your offices, stores and sites rely on you and your primary Internet connection to retrieve data. What will happen in the event of a circuit failure? Will it cause disastrous results of just annoy you a little bit? Are remote offices able to work at all? Can they process transactions or new orders? Share essential information with anyone? It is important that prior to choosing a solution, you understand the true needs and requirements of your particular organization. What if you are a software company? Perhaps you are running a hosted solution and it must be used by multiple customers; maybe even hundreds. Maybe you offer a service that allows other systems use an application program interface (API) to talk to you to collect information and data. It is possible they will not be able to connect to your servers. Multiple outages may annoy your customers.
Is the net integral to the proper function of your business? Do you rely on it entirely? Your employees or representatives will not be able to make outgoing phone calls if your circuits go down. Your representatives would also be unable to answer calls. You are now, essentially, out of organization. While most call centers that are reputable use redundancy, is it enough? Are your providers sufficiently reliable? Clear and reliable calls are essential. Does your carrier service consistently provide this?
Obviously, there are a variety of choices. Your budget, as well as the needs of your company, will help drive your decisions. As a wrap-up:
If you have one location or office and do not feel the need to consider redundancy for your system, a smaller access to The web circuit may be all you need. A single fifty, ten or five megabyte circuit might be enough. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. The availability of circuits and your location determine prices; speak with one of our engineers to learn what your best options are.
If you have a midsized organization in Pinellas Park, you will need higher-speed Internet access. Higher-speed circuits like Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet or others may be your best options. In a perfect world, you will achieve maximum redundancy by utilizing multiple carriers to provide and service different circuits. 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. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. You should speak with our experts to learn the options for your particular location.
Businesses with many locations face the greatest risk for failure. Redundancy is extremely crucial to them. Multiple providers or providers are recommended. Redundant routers, switches and other equipment can also be helpful to lessen downtime during a problem. As always, 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. The right combination of services and providers can positively impact the efficiency of your organization.
For companies falling in this category, gigabit Internet circuits, Metro Ethernet Internet circuits and point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits are essential. If you want to ensure your valuable uptime, have redundant circuits from multiple providers as well as redundant hardware. Having plenty of bandwidth will help avoid interruptions or decreased speed that sometimes occurs during spikes in usage. Both your hardware and circuits must be capable of supporting a vast number of simultaneous and fast connections.
There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. Your ideal single circuit or multiple circuits should stay within your budget while still meeting your demands. It is essential to choose the correct mix of hardware and circuits. Figuring out exactly what to put in the mix, can be a daunting task.
Our engineers can help. We will analyze your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. We are going to examine your demand levels and current usage. We’ll then design a plan that keeps your costs reasonable while meeting your demand for a smoothly run business.
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.