Network and Voice

Business Connectivity

Business connectivity is the internet and private network service that links your locations to each other, to the cloud and to everyone else. It covers everything from business broadband to dedicated fiber, private lines between sites and direct connections into a cloud platform.

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Buyer's checklist

Eight questions that decide this purchase

Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.

01
What is driving this project: an outage you never want repeated, new sites, more bandwidth, a move off MPLS, or cost? The trigger decides the shortlist.
02
For each address, how many people work there, what speed do they have now, and what do they need? One headquarters-sized circuit is the wrong shape for most branch offices.
03
What does an hour offline cost at each site, and which sites therefore need a second link on a different carrier and a different physical path?
04
Does any traffic need to stay off the public internet, over a private line, a private network or a direct cloud on-ramp?
05
What rides on this connection besides data: phones, video, point of sale? Voice and data sharing one link have to be sized together.
06
Who manages the router and the firewall at each site: your team, the carrier or a third party?
07
When do your current contracts end, and how long a term are you willing to sign? The end date sets your real negotiating window.
08
If two proposals look alike, what breaks the tie for you: support, the uptime commitment or cost?

More on what it is

The first distinction to learn is shared versus dedicated. Broadband is shared with other customers in the neighborhood, downloads far faster than it uploads, and is sold on a best-effort basis. Dedicated internet access, usually shortened to DIA, reserves bandwidth for your business alone. Upload and download speeds match, which is what video calls, cloud backups and phone traffic need. It also comes with a service level agreement, a written commitment on uptime and on how fast an outage gets repaired.

What you can buy depends on the address. One building has three fiber carriers in the basement. The next has broadband and nothing else. A remote site may be served only by fixed wireless, a 4G or 5G cellular link, or satellite. Carriers call a building on-net when their own network already reaches it and off-net when they have to lease the last stretch from someone else. When one company owns the path from your building to its backbone, there is one number to call when it breaks. When two companies are stitched together, installs run slower and repairs involve more people.

Some traffic should never touch the public internet. Private options include a point-to-point line between two sites, a private network such as MPLS that joins many sites, a wavelength or dark fiber for very large volumes, and a cloud on-ramp that connects you straight into a public cloud provider.

A second connection protects you only if it is really different. A backup link that enters the building through the same conduit, or rides the same carrier, fails along with the primary in the most common outages. Real diversity means a different carrier on a different physical path, or a different technology altogether, such as a wireless failover link.

Who needs it

Your people spend the day in video meetings and cloud applications, where upload speed matters as much as download.
One connection from one carrier is the only way online, and an outage stops the whole business.
You are opening locations and do not want a new network design each time.
You are moving off a private MPLS network because your applications now live in the cloud.
You have sites in rural areas where the usual local service cannot deliver the speed you need.
You run a school, a campus or a local government office with many users on one connection.
An application needs a private path into a specific public cloud.

A small office with a handful of people, cloud email and no phones on the network is often well served by good business broadband with a wireless backup. Dedicated access earns its place when downtime or slow uploads cost you real money.

Signs you need it

The connection sags at the same busy times every day because everyone is competing for it.
Video calls freeze and large files crawl on the way out, even though a speed test looks fine on the way in.
The last outage took every site, or every system, down at once.
You need more bandwidth and have been told it means a new build.
A carrier contract ends this year and nobody has looked at the alternatives.
You have several sites, several carriers and several bills, and no one can say what the total is. Telecom Expense Management exists for that.

How IT Raven helps

Connectivity is bought one address at a time, so that is where we start. Add Business Connectivity to your quote list and give us your locations. A person checks each address against the carriers in our 500+ partner network and tells you who is already in the building, who would have to build, and who would be reselling someone else's last mile. You see the options that are real for your addresses, including the ones that give you true path diversity.

Start early. Carriers take time to quote and longer to install, and a circuit that needs construction takes longest of all. We keep one thread through the order, the site survey, the install dates and the night you cut over, so you are not chasing five vendors.

Most connectivity projects pull in a neighbor. If you have many sites, SD-WAN and SASE manages all those links as one network. If phones ride the same connection, look at Cloud Phone Systems or Voice Lines and SIP Trunking in the same quote. After install the same team handles moves, upgrades, trouble tickets and the next renewal.

Eight questions that decide this purchase

166 companies to compare