What are the benefits of switching to broadband?
The biggest benefit is the cost savings. It’s so much less expensive to go the broadband route, and everyone is looking at costs right now. I think businesses would be shocked at the cost difference and the amount of data and phone service they can get. If your business is data-intensive, broadband might be able to bring efficiencies and cost savings to your organization, allowing you and your employees to work faster and more efficiently.
For example, where previously an employee could spend an hour or two with files, with broadband the time spent is much less, which can help increase sales. Because it frees up the time of sales reps who previously spent a lot of time with files, they can now spend that time selling.
The other thing you can do with the larger bandwidth is, instead of purchasing off-site storage for your data, you can now bring that storage capability in-house. Instead of paying a per-transaction cost to send your data off site, you can have all your locations sending data to your in-house server for as little as 25 percent of the previous cost.
It can be a game-changer, allowing a company to do some things it couldn’t do before, or, if it could, it would have had to pay through the nose to do them.
What are the cost benefits?
At our company, we would upload an image to an image company, and then that company would let other people see it, or move it around for us. When you’re producing 200 images a day at a cost of $2 a piece, that’s $400 a day, over 22 days a month, which is $8,800.
But you can buy a computer rack and system for less than that, and use broadband to do it yourself. The total hardware cost to do this is less than the cost of one month of doing it the old way. By buying an $8,000 computer and using broadband, you can do yourself what you used to pay for per month because you didn’t have the bandwidth to move the information around.
In addition, in the past, we were paying $2,000 a month for download speeds of 4 MB per second, guaranteed always on. Now, with broadband, I’m getting 50 MB per second for $300 a month. Even if you only save $100 a month by going with broadband, as a small business owner, every $100 in expenses is another $100 out of your pocket, and every $100 counts.
How can broadband expand with a company as its needs grow?
With a T-1 line, when a company’s needs increased, it had to physically bring in another box onto the line to increase its available bandwidth.
With broadband, it’s much simpler because the bandwidth is already available on the line. It’s just a matter of making a phone call to your provider to increase your bandwidth and paying a little more for the increase. There’s no physical installation or disruption of your business.
Tom Brown is president of Diagnostic Imaging Services, LC/OMI. Reach him at [email protected].