We’ve come quite a long way from the days when a business internet plan consisted primarily (or entirely) of dial-up connections. As various new technologies emerged and worldwide network infrastructure improved, high-speed internet service became a viable option for business owners across countless industries.
Any modern company that hopes to remain high-performing and competitive can’t rely on more traditional “high speed” connections, such as broadband or satellite internet, and expect to enjoy consistently optimal performance. A high-speed business internet connection that is scalable, resilient and compatible with today’s advanced network technologies is the only way to ensure your business has sufficient bandwidth for its vital operations.
High-speed business internet: The fundamentals
High-speed business internet service is designed to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of organizations with considerable bandwidth requirements while maintaining low latency and stable connectivity.
In an era where the use of cloud-based applications for a wide range of essential functions is the norm for many businesses — particularly those at the midsize scale and beyond — an internet connection capable of handling heavy traffic at high speed is a must for effective performance. For companies with over 20 employees using cloud-based software consistently, Business.com recommends a bandwidth of over 500 Mbps.
Today’s business world often proceeds at an ultra-rapid pace, meaning that an internet connection that lacks the bandwidth to keep up with daily operations is a serious handicap. Network bottlenecks and drastic reductions in connection quality — brownouts — are the inevitable result of slow internet service, and if these issues become consistent, they can have long-term adverse impacts on the bottom line.
The Entrepreneur Leadership Network’s Greg Davis named some of the effects of internet quality losses for companies. The company’s reputation and customer satisfaction can drop, as interactions between brand and audience suffer. The business can also suffer wasted productivity as internal cloud systems stop responding, as well as lost revenue opportunities due to inaccessible services ranging from data analysis tools to e-commerce storefronts.
Traditionally, ground-up solutions such as cable and fiber optic internet have been common sources of internet service for businesses. However, a top-down connectivity solution with multi-path flexibility, such as dedicated fixed wireless access (FWA) from WiLine, may be an essential option for companies that want to complement their fiber connections — or are located where optical fiber is unavailable. A recent Vertical Systems Group report found that while 1.4 million commercial buildings and data centers have optical fiber access, the remaining 3.8 million surveyed still don’t.
Can your existing internet service provider support your speed needs?
Hypothetically, it would be easier to make a list of businesses that don’t need high-speed internet service
rather than attempting to catalog all of those that do. While specific bandwidth needs vary across different companies, industries and even days of the week, the one constant is this: The secondary and tertiary costs — in capital and resources — associated with insufficient bandwidth and sluggish service can become prohibitive faster than you might think. Unless your business internet provider already offers a near-instantaneous connection, you could probably stand to bolster your bandwidth.
Keep in mind: This isn’t just about managing basic internet-related business needs, like ensuring that video conferencing calls have minimal latency — it’s about optimizing core internet-driven operations. Also, you have to ask yourself this: “Is my current ISP up to the task of my internet needs — not just now, but a few years down the road?”
Scalability considerations
Say you want your organization to start embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning on a significant scale. As any student of ModelOps or MLOps will tell you, this isn’t something that happens overnight. But even early on, when engineers are in the weeds of Python or R creating their algorithms… do you trust the speed your current internet provider offers to keep up with the uploads and downloads of training data at any given time? While you conduct model training and validation in the cloud, will the connection that comes with your current internet service plan grind to a halt during a critical moment in the reinforcement learning process?
For the sake of argument, let’s say your existing connection handled the initial gauntlet of developing, training and deploying some ML models. Can it maintain as you retrain those models with new data to eliminate bias or other flaws — or when you upscale your ML initiative from a half dozen models to several dozen? A hundred? More? High internet speed is hardly the only factor to consider in these plans, but it’s among the most important.
Consider another sample scenario: You’re a developer of leading-edge solutions for e-commerce retailers — producing apps that make online shopping into a truly enjoyable customer experience. You’ve decided it’s time to develop an augmented reality (AR) app to simulate certain aspects of brick-and-mortar shopping and give prospective buyers a better feel for key products.
Because this would be a customer-facing system, the bandwidth requirement to ensure the AR program runs as fast as possible is as much a customer service issue as it is one of app performance. If the connection speeds available to your company can’t support back-end operations, and AR shopping app performs poorly as a result, it could frustrate your clients’ loyal customers and turn off target consumers who may well have been intrigued. Then, your retail customers will turn that dissatisfaction on you. This all stemmed from your inability to scale your operations properly — which was itself due to a lack of use case-appropriate business internet.
The union of speed and versatility
In all likelihood, you know what faster speed your business internet needs to achieve optimal performance for both internal and (if applicable) customer-facing operations. The issue is knowing how to get there — not simply in choosing WiLine as your ISP, but knowing why we can be your ideal business internet provider.
WiLine’s enterprise-grade dedicated FWA solution stands out not for its prima facie technological bona fides, but for how they simultaneously drive speed and versatility. You start by choosing a package with a set speed (ranging from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps), but can scale up or down as your organization and its needs evolve. WiLine’s experts will help you identify exactly how your bandwidth must be adjusted to serve your business and can install add-on services to increase efficiency and optimize bandwidth.
On a day-to-day basis, our FWA solution helps optimize speed by using a large number of different connectivity paths. Through our software-defined path management, we monitor and prioritize network traffic based on its importance to business functions, so the most urgent traffic is directly to the highest-performing paths, minimizing latency and jitter while sticking to the speeds stipulated in your SLA.
Also, unlike many ISPs that have different upload and download speeds, WiLine’s solutions are symmetrical, always offering the same rate of speed for either function. With essential technologies ranging from cloud business apps to complex IoT device networks and platforms all competing for bandwidth in both directions, our symmetrical configuration contributes to versatility and optimized speed across all critical company functions.
Business internet doesn’t just need speed — it needs reliability
There’s no doubt that business internet needs the right amount of bandwidth and speed to operate at its full potential. But there’s more to internet carriers than how fast their connection is. With a dedicated internet access (DIA) solution like FWA that gives you multiple paths to connectivity, you’ll have speed and reliability working hand in hand.
The WiLine catalog — available in 44 states and counting — features a wide range of enterprise-grade internet solutions, highlighted by our multi-path fixed wireless service. But that’s hardly the only route to high speed: We also offer SD-WAN, carrier ethernet for blazing-fast connections between your business’s various locations and managed Wi-Fi. Beyond the realm of long-term connectivity, WiLine products such as endpoint security and business continuity solutions help mitigate the risks of hazards that can impede your internet speed and overall organizational performance.
Discover our offers today! Find a business internet solution that works for you.
