How Can You Solve Last Mile Connectivity Issues?

Centerpoint IT Helps Your Atlanta Business Resolve Last Mile Connectivity Issues?

Centerpoint IT provides strategic managed IT that can help you solve technology challenges. Let us deliver reliable connectivity over a secure network.  

Centerpoint IT: Your Trusted Atlanta Connectivity Professionals

Getting data from your Atlanta business to a remote data center involves a system of complex WAN connections. At Centerpoint IT, we run a well-managed data center to ensure reliable connectivity to an ISP backbone with high-quality SLAs. This ensures that your data travels over the internet quickly.

However, things slow down as data gets closer to remote users. Most users have access to fiber-optic Internet service, satellite connectivity, or 4G/LTE cellular service. These shared services deliver fluctuating speeds due to variable traffic over the backbone. Bandwidth Isn’t guaranteed and some latency can be expected. This “last mile” Creates performance issues that influence the customer experience.

“Developing last mile telecommunication technologies… is a crucial aspect in providing ICT services that can integrate millions of stakeholders…globally into the digital age, particularly with the advent of cloud computing,” according to one study.

What Are the Important Things to Know About Last Mile Latency?

The term “last mile” started out in transportation to describe the last leg of a route. Imagine a truck carrying goods from Chicago to Atlanta. For the better part of the journey, the truck can travel on the Interstate at highway speeds. Once it reaches Atlanta, it has to exit the highway and travel on more congested local roads to reach the customer.

Last-mile connectivity problems affect customer service, productivity, and the end-user. Completing that last leg of the journey takes much longer than traveling the same distance on the interstate. This is partially due to the lower speed limits in towns and cities. It’s also harder to navigate local roads and obstacles.

Transferring that analogy to networking, the corresponding factors are bandwidth, throughput and complexity — all of which increase latency.

Network latency causes:

• Slow file downloads
• Performance issues for applications
• Poor quality of service for voice and video, which rely on real-time services

Many companies add bandwidth to reduce network latency. That doesn’t solve the problem because data still must travel a greater distance and make more hops to get there. So, increasing bandwidth doesn’t improve the quality of service in this scenario.

This is even truer if you use shared internet services. Once traffic hits an overloaded network, it slows down. Like a wide-open highway ramp, congested traffic on the internet is just as effective as causing a traffic jam as bumper-to-bumper highway traffic.

What’s the Cost of Last Mile Delivery?

Last-mile impacts shipping and delivery channels as well as digital ones.

“As a share of the total cost of shipping, last-mile delivery costs are substantial — comprising 53% overall. And with the growing ubiquitousness of “free shipping,” customers are less willing to foot a delivery fee, forcing retailers and logistics partners to shoulder the cost. As such, it’s become the first place they’re looking to implement new technologies and drive process improvements,” according to Business Insider.

The same can be said of digital last mile bottlenecks, which cause frustration at the point of sales and during communications and data transfers. Slow responses for online e-commerce businesses cost real money in terms of customer dissatisfaction and abandonment.

How Can Centerpoint IT Help?

Leverage managed WAN connectivity from Centerpoint IT. We bolster last-mile connections with an intelligent software-defined network that picks the best data path available based on performance, availability and cost. this elastic bandwidth gives you a secure network capable of supporting multiple locations without degrading performance.

Why Should You Choose Centerpoint IT?

Centerpoint IT provides strategic managed IT that can help you solve technology challenges. Let us deliver reliable connectivity over a secure network. Contact Centerpoint IT today to set up an initial assessment and discuss the technology needs of your Atlanta business.