The lifeblood of Shakopee, Minnesota companies doing business in the current environment depends upon reliable Internet access. All companies, big and small, need fast and reliable Internet access.
Our dependence on access to The web will continue to grow in the coming months and years.
The use of the web is pervasive. We use it for email and data sharing, video chat and VOIP, archiving and commerce. What can best meet your needs? A cable modem may be satisfactory. Metro Ethernet may be the thing you need. Is Gigabit Internet right for you? Does your organization in Shakopee, Minnesota need one of these: 10 Meg Internet access, a 100 Meg Internet access point, a 50 meg circuit or a 5 meg circuit?
Before choosing an adequate or appropriate service, you must decide what your business really needs. Is the web only used for web surfing and email? Is it used to network with cloud servers? There may be remote locations that rely on you and you are hosting the data in Shakopee.
What if there is an outage and your high-speed Internet is interrupted? Will your company suffer from the lull? How much uptime is essential to your business? Prior to making any purchases, you must determine the answers to these questions.
Plainly stated, companies require high-speed Internet access. Before you choose your broadband, look at the costs and benefits. Performing this analysis is an important step in picking the right one for your business. While many providers like to spout technical terminologies such as:
… you must not lose sight of the real issue, which is understanding what technical solutions best meet your needs.
At most businesses including those in Shakopee, Minnesota, some or all employees need Internet access. Whether it is to communicate with shippers, do research or place orders, access to The net is required.
The number of employees you have may determine your best solution. If you only have a few workers, you may be fine with a smaller Internet circuit such as a 5 or 10 megabyte. If you have many employees who need to use the internet at the same time, you may do better with more.
High-speed Internet may become less important if the majority of your employees primarily use an intranet system with limited graphics and video. When they are frequently downloading things, whether documents, graphics or videos, however, speed is necessary for efficient job performance.
Does your company regularly conduct backups? If you are doing remote backups from every desk, which is advisable, you will need to be able to support simultaneous connections out to the web to synchronize your backup data.
Does your organization 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.
Are you interested in high-speed business Internet? Depending on where you are located, you may want to look into the viability of gigabit Internet and Metro Ethernet. These are typically found in “lit buildings” in Shakopee, Minnesota. Providers have already wired these buildings. The ease and affordability of adding high-speed Internet to your office may surprise you.
Introducing Metro Ethernet to a new building can be expensive. Bringing a connection to a suite within the building is not. Did you know that obtaining high-speed access to The Internet 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? Does your company use the hosted servers to run data feeds, APIs or websites for offices or businesses located elsewhere? Maybe your organization requires that dozens of satellite offices have access to a hosted application at your company main headquarters. Does your office host the point of sale (POS) system for every single store in a large retail chain? Does your legal practice host all of the data for 3, 4 or 5 offices in different locations?
If you host programs, data or information centrally, people outside of the central location need to have access. 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 places?
If you have one office using the web, you may get by with a cable modem or a low- cost 10-megabyte circuit. High-speed access to The Internet is advisable for the headquarters. Gigabit Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or some other high-speed dedicated circuit is recommended. High speed is important but they also must be able to support multiple distinct connections. This could probably not be accomplished with a cable modem.
In many scenarios, bringing in an inexpensive circuit, such as a 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. It is possible that you have a cable modem with a 30 Meg connection but cannot reach proper speeds during peak hours. Cable operators are only permitted to establish a certain amount of bandwidth within communities. The bandwidth branches off to the multiple buildings, offices and tenants within them. While you may be capped at thirty-megabyte speed, will you ever reach that speed during organization hours? Will there be trouble if your expectation is set at 30 but you only get 8 or 10?
Some providers offer customers dedicated and guaranteed bandwidth. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your organization. You should receive full capacity of your circuits during all hours. This is true even though you may have many buildings, businesses and tenants nearby.
For example, with Metro Ethernet, you can receive a guaranteed bandwidth in increments of five Meg circuits, 10 Meg circuits, 50 Meg circuits and 100 Meg circuits. You can reach gigabit speeds with gigabit Internet providers.
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.
Circuits can go down in Shakopee even though certain carriers offer superior Internet bandwidth products. What can you do to minimize the chance that you will experience an outage of some kind?
Circuits that are redundant may be a good idea.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
The first type is when one single carrier provides you with multiple circuits. These redundant circuits help protect from certain failures, for example, router port issues or physical line trouble. 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. You get some protection, but also some risk.
The second way to set up circuit redundancy is by using two different providers to bring in your circuits. These connections can be bound together so they act and appear to the public as a single circuit. Using particular routers and IP address allocations, no one would be able to tell that you have multiple providers or circuits. However, despite appearances, they are actually very much separate and are redundant to each other. You will get more substantial protection from this diversity redundancy. If one carrier has a problem, the other likely will not.
The providers you choose for your redundant circuits should have different physical pathways in Shakopee, Minnesota. This is an important consideration when trying to obtain the most redundancy. In other words, try to obtain circuits entering the building from different sides of the building. 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. What if there is some kind of catastrophic incident such as a fire or accident that impacts circuits within a region? Now, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.
The cost of dependable Internet access pales in comparison to the cost of unreliable access. Consider these scenarios:
Your office uses a cable modem and, in addition to you, the carrier provides 10-15 additional tenants with circuits. During organization hours, any of those tenants could be streaming video, performing massive file downloads, processing large volumes of phone calls and more. What will happen to your telephone calls as the amount of usable bandwidth decreases? How will the caliber of the call be affected? Are the calls going to be dropped? Will your voice be inaudible? Will you have difficulty hearing the other end?
Your office is the hub of your company, whether you are a retail company operating a distributed point of sale (POS) system, an accounting firm sharing databases or a law firm engaged in file sharing. All of your offices, whether you have 3 or 3, 000, rely on your primary Internet connection to successfully access data. If your circuit goes done, what will happen next? Would it cause mere annoyance or utter disaster? How much work, if any, can be done by your remote sites? Take new orders? Service existing ones? Share essential information with anyone? Make sure you completely understand your needs before you pick a solution. You have a software company, and are running a hosted solution for dozens, maybe hundreds, of 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 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?
Maybe your business depends entirely on the net. Your employees or representatives will not be able to make outgoing phone calls if your circuits go down. In addition, they will be unable to answer incoming calls. You are essentially out of organization. For competent call centers that already use and understand the problems that can arise, is redundancy enough? Are your current carriers as dependable as you would like? Is the quality of your calls consistently and reliably clear?
It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your organization needs and your budget will have to come into consideration when deciding on your solutions. To recap:
If you have one location or office and do not feel the need to consider redundancy for your system, a smaller access to The net circuit may be all you need. A single fifty, ten or five megabyte circuit might be enough. Find out if you are in a lit building. If so, the price of Metro Ethernet or gigabit service may be affordable. Prices vary based on your location and availability of circuits; speak with our engineers to find your best option.
You have a mid-sized Shakopee company; higher speed Internet access required. Gigabit Internet, Metro Ethernet and other higher speed Internet circuits are options to consider. In a perfect scenario, multiple circuits from different providers will give you the most redundancy. But can you do this without doubling costs? Sometimes, yes. Two smaller circuits may be cheaper than one. For instance, you may use two 50 meg circuits instead of a single 100 meg circuit. Do not forget that you will find variations in price and availability. You need to speak with one of our experts to determine your options in your specific location.
Any company with more than one location suffers the greatest risk of problems. Redundancy is extremely important to them. Multiple providers or providers are recommended. Redundant routers, switches and other equipment can also be helpful to lessen downtime during a problem. Have you looked at Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed access to The web circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. The right combination of services and carriers can positively impact the efficiency of your business.
Companies such as these require the following: Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and point-to-point (PPP) high-speed Internet circuits. If you want to ensure your valuable uptime, have redundant circuits from multiple providers as well as 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. The hardware and circuits you choose must both be able to support the following: a great number of concurrent, speedy connections.
There is great risk of failing circuits or insufficient bandwidth. It is imperative that the circuit or circuits you choose meet your needs but also keep you within your allowable budget. You have to select the optimal combination of hardware and circuits, which is a daunting task.
Our engineers can help. We are going to analyze your requirements and needs and create a free action plan for you. After reviewing your current usage and demand levels, we are going to generate a cost effective plan that provides your company with the resources it needs.
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