In the greater St. Louis area, innovation is everywhere. Startup companies and expanding enterprises in industries such as health care, technology and telecommunications are choosing the city for its business-friendly atmosphere and increasing workforce.
Earning attention as a “rising star” by Brookings, the city’s rapid growth in the technology sector and brisk workforce expansion has St. Louis pushing the limits of today’s digital infrastructure. Many businesses in St. Louis are operating a megabit network in a gigabit world, without access to the high-capacity bandwidth they need to scale.
To innovate, businesses need foundational tools and technology they can rely on – including high-capacity fiber services. Enterprises depend on their network to manage dozens of business-critical applications, including transmitting data across multiple office locations and administering data storage and replication. Nothing is worse than battling intermittent connectivity or high latency when milliseconds matter.
The lack of reliable connectivity comes at a real cost; connectivity infrastructure is a driver of economic growth. A recent Deloitte study concluded that a 10 percentage-point increase in broadband penetration in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs in 2019, or an average annual increase of 269,000 jobs.
Although access to bandwidth can be challenging, new opportunities are emerging. Businesses have long realized that they need more – more capacity, more speed, more reliability. And until now, they haven’t had the right solutions. Today, successful business strategies are built on the assumption that businesses have access to reliable, scalable connectivity. However, many businesses are realizing that to reach their full potential, it may be time to reassess their providers’ capabilities – or lack thereof.
Growing business demands require reevaluation of network connectivity
Fiber connectivity is leading the way when it comes to business transformation among St. Louis-area firms.
1. State-of-the-art fiber networks are table stakes for enterprise growth. Telecom infrastructure does not age like fine wine. Legacy networks have been patched together over time, through owned assets and those acquired through mergers and acquisitions. This has caused legacy providers to take extreme measures to increase capacity, most of which result in added latency to the network. In short, outdated infrastructure can slow down a company’s productivity considerably.
Modern fiber network providers are building new networks from the ground up, providing high-speed, low-latency connections running over properly constructed fiberglass infrastructure. Business-only fiber network Everstream’s entrance to the St. Louis market in 2019, for example, represented the first new connectivity option for local businesses in more than a decade. Due to demand for its high-capacity, highly reliable services, the organization has constructed 1,193 route miles of fiber network in the market to date.
2. Capacity demands see continued, aggressive rise. Next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence require massive amounts of bandwidth. Imagine building and deploying innovative technologies that rely on the performance of network infrastructure built 30 years ago. New fiber network infrastructure being built today is laying the foundation necessary to accommodate the bandwidth capacity and technology on the horizon, such as 400 billions of bits per second (Gbps), 800 Gbps and even 1.2 terabytes per second backbone capacity.
3. Network reliability is not a luxury. An outdated infrastructure can slow down a company’s productivity considerably, and its costly impacts happen more than you’d think. According to Opengear, more than half of senior IT decision makers and network managers say they have had four or more network outages lasting more than 30 minutes in the past year, resulting in downtime losses upward of $6 million. Modern fiber service providers like Everstream are leveraging new infrastructure and software-based solutions such as automation and artificial intelligence to amplify network aptitude. This significantly reduces latency and improves reliability.
A fiber-network case study
Selecting the right network provider is a make-or-break decision. Each business has its own needs and goals. Here’s what one of Everstream’s customers was able to achieve with access to a highly reliable fiber network:
- Eliminate downtime and associated lost revenue.
- Leverage cloud-based storage via AWS.
- Link multiple sites to two geographically diverse data center facilities.
- Update on-premises customer contact centers to cloud-based solutions.
- Support remote employees with instantaneous file access, improving efficiency.
- Significantly reduce the time to complete data backup and replication, oftentimes to a few seconds.
- Improve the customer experience at their retail location by providing lightning-fast Wi-Fi access.
Modern fiber providers like Everstream are investing in a new fiber infrastructure in St. Louis to support the demands of growing businesses. Yet not all networks are alike. When assessing your business requirements, consider the underlying infrastructure of your connectivity provider and be sure to address the imperative questions.
Everstream has raised the bar for business connectivity, delivering a business-only fiber network with the speed, reliability, scale and performance that today’s enterprises demand. With more than 27,000 route miles of fiber and speeds up to 100 Gbps, Everstream’s enterprise-grade network delivers robust business fiber services. For more information, visit everstream.net.