The business world has been revolutionized by the digital age. Information is the capital of a new generation. It can be bought and sold, or it can be given away for free and its momentum harnessed to bring revenue through advertizing. As the internet continues to grow, information is perhaps the closest thing to an unlimited natural resource the world has ever seen. Yet many companies, even as they prospect on the next trend of the information age, do not turn adequate attention to their own internal structures for information flow. Many companies hold off too long from investing in their internal networks, citing the cost as too high. I believe this is a fatal mistake, especially when lightning-quick business decisions on a global scale depend almost entirely on a fast, reliable and functional IT network within your business. I believe more companies would do well to look at quality used network equipment and invest in an upgrade as soon as possible. used Aastra equipment, for example, continues to deliver the great results expected of Aastra at a much lower price than new equipment. This kind of advantage can make it easy for a business to upgrade.
Let’s look at some of the different components of your IT network to see how this works. At the basic level, each office in your company has its own Local Area Network which connects all of its computers and servers. Typically this local area network is connected by means of fiber optic ethernet cable, a very high-speed cable designed specifically for fast data transmission. And wherever your LAN connects to the internet, connection speed is determined by the media used by your internet service provider (ISP). ISPs have offered increasingly mind-blowingly fast speeds over the last 15 years in a constant effort to outperform their competitors. The ethernet cable in your buildings can keep up with these speeds, but can the computers at your staff’s work stations? A computer’s connection speed is determined by its network card, a little card inside the machine that allows it to talk to the network. Even older computer can, in many cases, keep up with faster speeds if just their network card is updated. used Lorain products such as network cards are very easy to get for a low price these days. This means many of the computers in your offices may be offering slower data service speeds than they have to, and could be upgraded to top speed for a very low cost. Since internet connection speed determines the speed of work pace in many cases (especially reading and sending emails), this tiny step alone can have a significant impact on productivity.
used Pulsecom equipment can also be a tremendous investment in your business. Pulsecom offers some of the best in terms of routers, hubs and switches for your network. Those words don’t mean anything to you? Well, if you are running a competitive business in 2012, they should. Routers, hubs and switches are the devices that connect different parts of your network. If multiple computers and printers need to talk to each other they usually go through a router. If multiple departments in an office need to talk to each other, they run through a hub. And switches allow different layers of your network to communicate – for example, your secure data storage network to be accessed by individual staff, or the local network in an office building to access the internet or talk to another corporate location across the world. The value of these devices then cannot be overstated; they are literally the gatekeepers of your information architecture.
There have been a number of developments in these technologies that can make an upgrade worthwhile. For example, once upon a time networks used something called repeaters. Like a radio repeater tower, these devices cleaned up and boosted signals so they could be sent over long distances. Now, repeater capabilities are built into most hubs. In a similar way, hubs and switches themselves have been continually improved to learn where data needs to go. Early hubs simply took incoming data from one source and passed it along to every “port” (connection) they had. This ensured it got the right part of the network for the recipient, but also means a lot of extra wasted bandwidth on your network and potentially, slower speeds for users. Nowadays devices are very good at figuring out exactly where a particular piece of data needs to be send and directing it only to that one port, thus saving burden on the rest of the network. The benefits of making these upgrades should be obvious.
I hope this has given you some insight into how your network works and why it can be so important to upgrade. The cost can be really mitigated by investing in quality used equipment. It is an investment your business can’t afford to skip!