If you anticipate your business growing over the next 12 to 18 months, now is the time to consider moving from a copper-based service to fiber optics for your data transmission needs.
“If you see your needs growing, fiber is the only way to go,” says Chris Hibbs, senior manager, engineering, for InsightBusiness. “If you need the bandwidth to be there all the time, you need it to be reliable and you need the speed to be there, you’re going to need fiber.”
Smart Business spoke with Hibbs about how moving to a fiber optics system can help you run your business faster and more efficiently and how the system can grow with your business with minimal hassle and expense.
What are the benefits of fiber over more traditional services?
Traditionally, upstream bandwidth is limited with cable modems and DSL, as there is much more bandwidth available to download data than there is to upload. That’s fine for businesses that are only using a data product to pull down data from the Internet, do research or run a small point of sale system that doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth.
Those mediums are also known for having fluctuating speeds depending on factors including traffic congestion and how far you are from a central office (in the case of DSL).
Fiber, on the other hand, has a dedicated connection, not a shared line, so it’s not subject to fluctuations in speed. Fiber has a committed information rate, with the same bandwidth for both uploading and downloading.
If you require a lot of upstream bandwidth, or up and down, and need it available every time you make a request, or you use delay-sensitive applications, jitter-sensitive applications or videoconferencing, then you need the bandwidth right then and there and can’t wait half a second or even 300 milliseconds for that bandwidth to become available like you may with another broadband product.
