Imagine that you are on an important business call with a new client, or hosting a videoconference with team members to discuss an urgent project, and your internet goes down. It can be incredibly frustrating.
If you are running cloud applications, hosting a website or communicating with customers online, an outage can put your business on hold. It can also cost you money.
According to a 2021 survey from the research firm ITIC, 91% of enterprises report that a single hour of downtime costs $300,000 or more. Four out of 10 said that an hour of downtime costs their company between $1 million and $5 million.
While an outage may have less of a financial impact on your business, it is still a significant disruption. If employees cannot access the data or applications they need or are unable to connect with customers, work can quickly grind to a halt.
While nearly every fiber business network provider talks about their reliability, there is a big difference when it comes to internet uptime guarantees.
Here are some of the more important questions you should ask when shopping around for fiber internet for business.
Do You Offer Five Nines Reliability?
Five nines is industry shorthand for 99.999% uptime, considered the gold standard in reliability for fiber internet for business. 99.999% uptime means that your potential downtime is less than 0.001%, or just a bit more than five minutes per year.
Some fiber business network providers offer 99%, 99.9% or 99.95% uptime. 99% sounds pretty good until you learn that you might lose internet service for more than three and a half days. Here is how these reliability numbers compare:
- At 99%, you can expect 3.65 days (2,102 hours) of downtime a year, or an average of 14.4 minutes daily.
- At 99.5%, you can expect 4.38 hours of downtime per year, or an average of 1.44 minutes daily.
- At 99.9%, you can expect 8.77 hours of downtime each year, or 2.88 minutes daily.
- At 99.95%, you can expect 26.3 minutes of downtime annually, or 4.3 seconds a day.
Compare that to the five nines — 99.999% — which only anticipates 5.26 minutes annually, or less than one second per day.
Who Owns Your Fiber?
Some fiber business network providers lease their lines or share fiber among customers. Not only can this diminish the quality of service you get and slow down your internet, it can also cause problems in case of an outage.
When there are multiple vendors involved in providing your fiber internet for business, you are at the mercy of the providers identifying the problem, deciding who is responsible, and then getting it fixed. If possible, work with a fiber internet for business company that provides dedicated fiber network services on their own fiber.
How Do You Prevent Network Problems?
The best fiber business network provider will operate an in-state network operations center that monitors the network 24/7 year-round for performance and security. This proactive monitoring will catch most potential problems before they hit your business.
It is also a good idea to work with a provider that has technicians and repair teams nearby. If you have to wait for someone to come from outside the area or for your provider to find a contractor who is able to do the repair, it can be a long wait.
LOGIX Fiber Networks is Built for Business
With 99.999% uptime guaranteed as part of the SLA, Texas-based 24/7 year-round monitoring and technicians, and Texas-based customer service and support, LOGIX Fiber Networks has the most reliable fiber internet for business.
LOGIX has more than 300,000 fiber miles in Texas, making it the largest owner and operator of fiber in the state. With a state-of-the-art core backbone, diverse Tier-1 internet peering points and multiple fiber rings in major Texas markets, you can rest assured that your fiber internet for business will be there when you need it.
Contact LOGIX Fiber Networks today at 281-688-6231, or request a quote to start working with the best business internet provider in Texas.