Internet Access Indiana

Join us for Techpoint Tech Thursday to kick off the new year.

January 19th TechPoint Tech Thursday
5:00 - 6:30 p.m. at Faegre Baker Daniels

Featuring
Gerry Dick
President and Managing Editor of
Grow Indiana Media Ventures, LLC &
Creator and Host, Inside INdiana Business

 

Gerry Dick

In June 2000, broadcast news veteran Gerry A. Dick and technology entrepreneur Scott A. Jones formed Grow Indiana Media Ventures, LLC, a media company created to deliver Indiana business news and information through multiple media sources. Mr. Dick is president and managing editor of Grow Indiana Media Ventures and Mr. Jones serves as chairman.

 

Grow Indiana Media Ventures' properties include Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick, Indiana's most watched local business television program; InsideIndianaBusiness.com; Inside INdiana Business Radio, The INside Edge Morning Briefing and INside Edge Mid-Day e-newsletters and a variety of interactive media products.

 

More About Inside Indiana Business
Inside INdiana Business is Indiana's Business News Leader.

Grow INdiana Media Ventures, parent company of the powerful Inside INdiana Business brand of multi-media business news products, was created in 2000 by broadcast news veteran Gerry Dick and technology entrepreneur and visionary Scott Jones.

Today, more people access the Inside INdiana Business brand for Indiana business news than any other source. With a fully-integrated portfolio of television, radio, Internet, permission-based email and on-demand business news products, Inside INdiana Business delivers content that is trusted by an educated and affluent audience.

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Inside INdiana Business delivers daily content that can be watched, heard and read in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois (including Chicagoland), Ohio, Kentucky and markets around the globe.

About Tech Thursday
TechPoint's Tech Thursday presented by LightBound includes an informational presentation, networking, drinks and hors d'oeuvres at the Northside law offices of Faegre Baker Daniels.

There is no charge, but please register so that we may provide adequate supply of drinks and hors d'oeuvres.

If you registered but are not going to be able to attend, please contact Elizabeth Anderson at eanderson@techpoint.org to cancel your registration.

Hosting uptime  refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. Many providers state that they aim for at least 99.9% uptime (roughly equivalent to 45 minutes of downtime a month, or less), but there may be server restarts and planned (or unplanned) maintenance in any hosting environment, which may or may not be considered part of the official uptime promise.

Many providers tie uptime and accessibility into their own service level agreement (SLA). SLAs sometimes include refunds or reduced costs if performance goals are not met.

LightBound, an Indiana Internet Access Service Provider offers high speed Internet unlike what most other Internet service providers can offer. LightBound peers directly with the top Internet providers in the country in order to provide a robust and redundant network with low latency.
I spoke with a customer today that is struggling with the cost of bandwidth and trying to weigh the options between a more cost-effective option versus the more costly option with higher speed. In their daily business they upload large graphic files and need to have a robust network in order to guarantee Internet access at all times, with a high upload speed. After reviewing their options they decided upon LightBound's Internet access service so that they can insure their business is constantly online and running.  
LightBound also offers business continuity, WAN configuration, and VoIP services over their high-speed network.

LightBound, an Indiana Internet Access company, offers server collocation, data disaster recovery, and managed servers.
Our Network Operations Center is manned 24x7x365.
Including this holiday season, and upcoming winter weather, we will be manned constantly.

I was speaking with a customer today reagrding our internet compared to other internet providers in Indiana. LightBound maintains a physical presence in two network access points located in Chicago, Illinois and Ashburn, Virginia, providing diversity, redundancy, and "always on" availability for our customers. LightBound interconnects with other tier one providers such as AT&T, Level3, and UUNet with gigabit connections which gives us an aggregate transport capacity in excess of 4Gb/s back to our datacenter in Indianapolis. In addition, we maintain private peering connections both locally and in Chicago and Ashburn. We are interconnected with the Equinix "packet exchange peering fabric" in both network access points. This allows us to directly peer with hundreds of popular destination networks such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, the GigaPOP education network, as well as many local carriers.
So, not all internet providers are the same. LightBound may not be the cheapest option, but it is the highest quality in Indiana.

0 Comments »

Businesses have to plan for operating in event of a disruption in business operations at their main facilities.  This planning is commonly referred to as business continuity.  Since most business rely heavily on IT it would make sense to plan on having critical resources available over the Internet.  Internet is highly available so employees can access when they are on the road traveling away from the office or working at home.  To keep the business up and running it would pay off to have your critical information backed up using  off site data backup service and using server collocation to have backup servers or primary servers   This would surely help in data disaster recovery if the primary location was every effected by a power outage, damage of equipment, or theft.  The data housed on equipment at the data center or back up service could be restored and get the business up and running at the main facility.   LightBound can be a one stop shop for business continuity needs providing WAN, Indiana Server Hosting, and Internet Service Indiana. 

If you use Salesforce CRM in your business and are looking to increase productivity and sales this about migrating to Fonality trixbox VoIP PBX Solutions. trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition has seemless Integration with Salesforce SFA.  If you have an incoming call from a high potential sale you can quickly identify the opportunity form the Salesforce record and give that prospect the priority needed to close the deal. Save time in agents and sales reps logging calls to Saleforce as they are automatically logged.  You can increase the reach of access by using SIP and the Fonality HUD on your sales reps laptop can work anywhere they have Internet access.  trixbox VoIP PBX Solutions works with SIP protocol. LightBound is an Indiana VoIP provider that can deliver SIP voice over business class private circuits as well as the Fonality trixbox solution.   Do you want to learn more?  LightBound will be hosting a lunch and learn on 12/2/2009 form 11:30 am  to 1:00 pm at 731 W. Henry Street showing off integration trixbox Unified Agent Edition and Salesforce SFA.  Contact jshinkle@lightbound.net if you want to reserve a spot.

I attended the Techpoint Innovation Summit '09 in Indianapolis, Indiana and Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor, was the keynote speaker.  He spoke about "disruption innovation" and the way that it drives innovation that upsets the apple cart for the incumbent providers of products and services.   One interesting service he pointed out was Salesforce CRM.  CRM systems typically were only affordable by large corporate entities that had large central systems and a corporate WAN to distribute access  throughout the corporation. Salesforce is a CRM system that provides enterprise level functionality, accessibility and scalability to the smallest of businesses, even a single person business, as long as they have High Speed Internet in Indiana.  Another disruptive innovation that offers enterprise level functionality, including call center capability, is Fonality Trixbox IP PBX.   Call centers typically are six figure capital investments requiring a large staff to support.   Fonality Trixbox is a VoIP PBX Solutions that can be implemented for about 20% of the cost and it integrates with Salesforce CRM.  The combination of the two can enable a start up or SMB compete with the large Fortune 500 corporation at a fraction of the cost. 

If you're business relies on having high availability Internet service make sure that your Internet DSL Internet or High Speed Internet in Indiana provider has upstream redundant connections.   Ask your Internet providers what business continuity and data disaster recovery plans they have to keep service running in event of upstream service interruption.  There are many Internet providers that only have a single upstream connection to the Internet.  There was a major outage in the area last week due to a fiber cut in a key communication line to an upstream Internet Provider in Chicago.  This left many customers without Internet Service.   Lightbound, which provides High Speed Internet in Indiana, has two 2.5 GB upstream connections, one to Herndon, Virginia and the other to Chicago.   Even though the Chicago connection was cut there still was a full 2.5 GB connection to Virginia that provided Lightbound customers uninterrupted Internet Access Indiana. This is very important if you are using managed servers hosting or server collocation in a facility that needs always available High Speed Internet in Indiana.                                                                                                                          

Cloud computing has been the buzz in the IT industry as of recent.  The benefit of cloud computing is cost savings by not having to make investment in capital IT resources.  You purchase on demand the the unused capacity of another companies computing power.  If you are using cloud computing for applications that your information workers use on a daily basis they key to performance is a high quality Internet connection.  Many companies buy Internet purely as a commodity and look at it on a price for MB basis.   All Internet access is not created equal.  You need to consider who is you Internet provider using for upstream connections.  How large are the upstream connections.   Do they have redundant upstream providers.  If you have a Internet Service Provider who provides a 10 MB connection to a business, but they only has a DS3 (45 MB) connection that is shared among 100 or more businesses you are not going to get very good service.   In order to get peak performance for cloud computing check into the details of what you Internet Service Provider has behind the scenes. For top quality Internet Service Indiana, Internet Access Indiana, Indiana DSL Internet, and High Speed Internet in Indiana look to Lightbound to provide you top quality high performing service.

The recent winter weather resulted in thousands of people being without power and probably effected hundred of businesses.   As a result there was a great deal of lost revenue from closed businesses and lost productivity due to workers not being able to get to work.   In order to minimize the lost revenue and productivity a business should have a business continuity plan to address situations.  A few key strategies to keep the business running is to host critical IT and Voice systems at a data center with server collocation.  When power goes down at the main office the critical systems are up and running.  Remote workers can get  to  the systems with Indiana DSL Internet and a VPN connection.  VoIP PBX solutions housed at the data center could take incoming calls and route to cell or home phones of home workers.   If workers are in areas that don't have power or phone service at the very least messages are going to voice mail.   I was able to work from a home office yesterday and was fully productive as I could get phone calls from customer and access all business IT systems remote to conduct my daily business.   My productivity may have been down after 2 hours of snow shoveling, but I was at least able to do all the normal activities I do at the office.

I ran across an interesting article about Indiana Health IT driving Economic Stimulus.   See :

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=R&url=http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl%3FACCT%3D104%26STORY%3D/www/story/01-28-2009/0004961987%26EDATE%3D&cid=1298199546&ei=G4eASbD6GIbElQT254H-AQ&usg=AFQjCNG2ZTF8PbhV92mvleOLxFemAiBcTg


It's pretty interesting that Central Indiana is considered a leader in Health IT.   I think much of this has to do with the Internet Service Indiana providers that facilitate high speed broadband connectivity to many of the Health providers.   Typically in the past T1 circuits were typically used, but now 10, 100, and Gigabit Ethernet circuits are becoming common to connect health care providers.  This is necessary to due the large amount of data that medical imaging requires and access that remotely connected physicians need to access it.   Many of the medical providers in Indiana WAN are being moved to data centers to provide business continuity to facilitate always on connectivity 24x7x365.   The cost of high speed broadband in central Indiana is helping to facilitate the exchange of information to improve health information exchange.

Today has been a day full of explaining how different providers actually regulate Quality of Service on your Internet Access Connections.

Not all Internet Access is the same, what do I mean by that.

What I mean is, and I am not a gamer(but in the gamer world this is paramount), but end to end performance is the key and can you really afford to have your customers waiting on data back from your web servers.  You may be sitting there saying my server is running at 5 percent utilization and my customers are calling about poor performance.

They will go somewhere else, that is why every Internet Access Provider is not the same.  Make sure you understand your needs before you go out and buy the cheapest solution.  If your goal is just surfing that is different than hosting servers.

If you can remember that end to end performance is what you are after you do find and maybe that will indirectly make your business more profitable.

Have a great day!

jack

www.lightbound.com
jcarr@iquest.net