Are you still struggling with DSL or some other Internet service that is burdened by low speeds, network congestion, high latency, packet loss or all of these? It’s a frustration, isn’t it? What’s more, you are probably losing more money every month than you would spend to upgrade to high performance fiber optic broadband service. The big question: “Is there business fiber optic Internet near me?”
Times Have ChangedWhen you first moved up from dial-up ISDN, or X.25 connectivity to broadband, options were probably few. There was a time when DSL was state of the art. Even ADSL shared on a standard phone line offered a huge advance in line speed over what else what available.
If you could afford them, T1 lines were a lot more stable and reliable, although speed was capped at 1.5 Mbps… still plenty in the early days of e-commerce.
Many businesses opted for satellite as a way to connect retail locations to the home office. High latency and weather outages were just something to be dealt with.
But, this is ancient history. The whole nature of business operations has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. The Internet isn’t just for email or looking up information anymore. It’s IS your connection to all-things in the cloud and around the world. There’s no good reason to just get by with whatever connectivity you’ve had. That is, not when fiber optic Internet might be right next door and a fraction of the cost it was when you last took a look.
Fiber Has Been Sneaking Up on You
It’s a fact that conduits full of fiber optic cables have been quietly being trenched into both urban and rural right of ways all across the country. You don’t see headlines about this anymore, because it isn’t breaking news that somebody just put a fiber cable in the ground like it used to be. Fiber is now considered vital infrastructure and is being routinely installed, just like gas pipes and power lines. You almost have to be a little careful where you plant a shovel in the ground these days. You might just chop a fiber cable in two…. and that is one expensive situation to fix.
Who’s Burying Fiber Cables Nearby?
The telephone company is the traditional installer of telecom infrastructure including copper and fiber lines. In fact local telcos pretty much own all of the twisted pair copper in the ground and on the poles. Fiber… not so much.
While telephone companies are, indeed, in a mad dash to upgrade their physical plants to meet the nearly insatiable bandwidth demands of 4G and soon to be 5G wireless, cloud services and video distribution, there are other major players too.
You might think of cable companies as married to coax copper lines. That’s what they install in your building, after all. What you don’t see is that those coax lines terminate to fiber lines not far away. Cable fiber forms the backbone of their networks. It’s only recently that the major cable companies have offered business users fiber connections to their network. Get business cable fiber and you’ll have almost unlimited bandwidth, low latency and minimal packet loss, all at a reasonable price.
Independent network companies are the other big source of fiber optic infrastructure. These companies have built out their own regional and national fiber networks and may well completely bypass both the telephone and cable companies to hook you up directly.
So, How Do I Get Fiber?
You can get out there and do your own research, but you may miss some of the best fiber providers. They don’t necessarily have a local office or advertising. Your best shot to get the most options at the best competitive pricing is to go through a bandwidth broker. This is a company that has relationships with dozens of service providers and the service maps to know exactly what is available and how close it is to your location. You might even be surprised to learn that the building next door is already lit for fiber broadband and it is no trouble at all to get you a connection quickly.
Want to find out right now where fiber optic Internet services are relative to your business (not residential) address? Take a minute or so to enter your address and get a map and list of fiber optic Ethernet broadband near you. Then use the handy inquiry form to describe just what you are looking for and how you’ll use it to get pricing and install times for the best service options.
