Get business bandwidth your way

“What makes some Internet downloads lightning fast, and others so slow you can write five texts while waiting for the quarterly report to appear?"

Todd Anderson | Director of Sales | Nextera Communications

Bandwidth is the rate data can be transferred from one point to another. It boils down to the connection between your company's network and Internet Service Provider (ISP), which depends on the pipe size data passes through before it reaches your desktop. The bigger, the better, the faster – and more expensive. But like any other purchase, choosing the right bandwidth size depends on your needs.

For instance: If you're a two-person shop, renting office space with 12 offices wouldn't be a smart investment. Likewise, if you're a company with very minimal data needs, paying for an excessive amount of bandwidth each month wouldn't make sense. One bandwidth size doesn't fit all. It depends on your specific business needs and whether bandwidth is shared with other companies in your building or down the block.

For instance: If you're a two-person shop, renting office space with 12 offices wouldn't be a smart investment. Likewise, if you're a company with very minimal data needs, paying for an excessive amount of bandwidth each month wouldn't make sense. One bandwidth size doesn't fit all. It depends on your specific business needs and whether bandwidth is shared with other companies in your building or down the block.

For control over bandwidth speeds, private bandwidth used only by the people in your company is the solution. When companies share bandwidth, they also share speeds, which aren't consistent hour-by-hour or day-by-day. Speeds tend to be slower because they're influenced by what the companies who share your bandwidth are doing. Shared bandwidth also delivers asymmetrical speeds, with significantly lower uploads.

With dedicated bandwidth, if you have 5 Megs of bandwidth, download and upload speeds won't be impacted even if your office is next door to a video gaming test center. Because the bandwidth is all yours.

Assuming you go with private bandwidth, the next step is figuring out how much bandwidth is enough for your company to achieve peak performance. To determine how much you need, talk to your Internet Service Provider. Video streaming, cloud apps, PTP sharing, hosting FTP sites, graphics, photos, and social media downloading can all impact usage. Once you have a good idea of your needs, consider how often you need maximum bandwidth.

Ensuring you don't scrimp on bandwidth is key. It's bad for business. Slow Internet downloads and uploads can result in lost sales, low productivity, communication issues and daily frustration. And nothing's worse that inviting customers or shareholders to a video conference and witnessing their reaction as the screen fades to black.

It seems logical that if you want consistently fast connections, big bandwidth is the way to go. But what if you run a company that only needs a lot of bandwidth some of the time? If you live in Minnesota, there's a new option you can choose called burstable bandwidth. It's a unique, user-friendly Internet configuration that saves companies money without sacrificing high performance.

In a nutshell, burstable (also known as scalable) bandwidth lets companies customize pipe size to fit their needs. For example, a business can use a few Megs of bandwidth nine months of the year but turn it up to 5 or 10 Megs when data needs increase. It's even possible to increase bandwidth for few days each year. Check out this case study on burstable bandwidth about a Minnesota auction company that runs global video events several times a year.

At Nextera, customers control bandwidth by going to our website, logging into the MyStats program and managing their connections right online. Customers can quickly and easily increase or decrease bandwidth in one-half Mbps increments whenever they need to resize. It's an ideal solution for companies with intermittent bandwidth needs requiring high performance – without paying the cost of big bandwidth 12 months a year.

And what if you're a company that only needs big bandwidth once a year? Using a flexible and private Internet connection option known as fixed wireless, Nextera can make events happen almost anywhere. We've supplied the Internet connections for one-off and annual occasions that include Red Bull Crashed Ice, political conventions, Holes for Heroes Ice Fishing Tournaments, the River's Edge Music Festival, plus Target Center and Excel Energy Center events. Most companies are unaware Internet bandwidth can be flexible and brought to them at huge indoor venues and outdoor gatherings in all kinds of weather.

Not long ago, dial-up Internet connections were the standard. But we've come a long way in a short time. Today, bandwidth can be customized in innovative ways that meet one-of-a-kind business needs. This allows even small businesses the freedom to consider all possibilities and think big.