Thursday, March 11, 2010

I Need a Bigger Pipe... Or Two!

Get your minds out of the gutter. I tried explaining the intricacies of packets and bandwidth to my very non-technical wife. As she tried to pay bills on her laptop, I was simultaneously downloading a 10 gigabyte restore file from Mozy.com backup system. Needless to say, Internet was slow, and she didn't understand why. After all, we were on different computers, right?

As you well know, it's the not client machine that matters as much as the upstream/downstream speeds of the broadband connection--and, in this case, the immense chunk of that which my downloads were eating up. How our router prioritized that traffic (her browsing on National City Bank's website vs. my download, I'm not certain) but the end result was that we had little means to speed up her high-priority traffic over my low priority traffic (I left the download running all night, no rush).

Now, scale that much bigger. Restaurants and c-stores face a larger challenge than just two bickering spouses on a couch. A friend of mine, and small restaurateur, offers free wi-fi at his location. I was in there for lunch the other day, a packed dining area (good for him), and my credit card transaction took a painstaking 30 seconds to process. "You're not processing on the same connection as their wi-fi, are you?" I asked. Sure enough, he was.

In fact, one connection serviced both his customer's wi-fi and the business-critical data back-up, payment processing, and POS system (a web-based SaaS program). Besides the obvious PCI-compliance issues this raises, for the business owner, the customer experience is king, and operational efficiency runs a close second. Both of those factors were jeopardized because he needed a bigger pipe... or, in reality, he needed two.

Fixed Wireless Broadband provides not only redundance (a backup network when needed) but for thousands of stores Accel Networks has used wireless to provision a dedicated connection for business-critical needs in just days. Learn more about our solutions here.

Labels: Bandwidth, Fixed Wireless Broadband