A few years ago the biggest news in IT was faster broadband and getting away from reliance on the national telecommunications provider and its ADSL offering. Suddenly there were alternatives and the word fibre took on a whole new meaning for South Africa. But slowly issues such as slow infrastructure roll out and cable theft made these solutions less than reliable which is where the obvious answer came in – wireless connectivity.
Why obvious? Well if fibre were the better option why would 60 million phones be connected to a wireless connection and not to a physical piece of fibre?
Enter a switched on office block today and you’ll immediately notice the lack of cables and wires in their offices; no more bunches of wires grouped under desks and above all, constant connectivity. And let’s face it, that’s what every business needs today to succeed. Any loss of connectivity is annoying but what is the true cost to your business?
Network frustration
According to Mark Taylor CEO of Nashua, loss of connectivity means loss of revenue for your company. “Let’s say I need to send a quote to a prospective customer and I find due to fibre cable theft my network is down. For every minute my quote isn’t reaching that customer, other company’s quotes are. I may need to call a customer on my IP Phone making a VOIP call – if the quality of the call is bad because the network capacity isn’t there I’m going to lose business – again.”
One size fits all not the answer
“Far too many companies are trying to cut down their business network connection costs and spend about R 599,00 or R 999,00 monthly, explains Taylor. This doesn’t make sense. If you divide this over the number of days in a month, that’s roughly thirty rand a day. Wouldn’t you be better off spending a hundred rand a day and having a guaranteed quality of service? What we offer isn’t an off the shelf solution – it’s a specialised solution. We want to make sure everything with an IP address in your building works all the time.”
Today everyone is trying to undercut their competition and the prices can look tempting but when you take a spectrum of network and share it with 20, 30 or 100 people suddenly the response and speed of data uploads and downloads gets slower and slower until it almost stops.
Nashua ensures quality of service by using world class equipment and a Next Generation Network, making sure there’s more than sufficient capacity to receive and transmit that data.
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Not all wireless infrastructures are equal
You may find that some wireless infrastructures exist with 100 dishes on 100 roofs with one link to the back – so guess what, this adds up to a lot of congestion. This is where point to point dedicated, guaranteed access comes in. Obviously, different businesses have different needs, depending on the complement of your staff and what you actually do.
“What’s important is that if you’re going to be backing up your PCs and servers you’re becoming even more reliant on that connection. So much is stored in the cloud – your accounting systems, your valuable data. If the speed of your connection is degraded your entire ability to function goes with it.
“The big problem here is that many businesses are looking at offerings aimed at the home user, explains Taylor. “Corporates should look at all their expenses and ask which portion is used to derive profit for the business? This will always lead to infrastructure. Look at how much people spend on rent in a building – which doesn’t drive their business versus what they spend on connectivity, which does.”
