IT HAPPENED AGAIN, DIDN'T IT?

Technology is taking over just about everything in our lives and if you own a restaurant or retail business, you certainly understand those businesses have seen a LOT of changes recently. For instance, those old plastic boards are being replaced by digital signage. You can even order the right size or color dress right from the dressing room! Point-of-sale (POS) systems have come a long way from the old knuckle busters or the Trans 330’s... not only as a way to process a credit cards but a full featured system that not only takes those cards but manages everything from inventory to orders, and more. You can even pipe in music from the internet instead of the local radio station and guests get access to their own WiFi.

We work with companies like yours every single day, and our solutions cover the gamut of all your needs. I’d love to talk more about how your retail or restaurant business is using technology, and I of course would appreciate a chance to tell you more about how we could work together.

 Internet Down?

I talk to a lot of small businesses every day. What I continue to find is that most simply aren’t prepared for the internet going down. Think about that for a second… your internet goes out. How do you take payments? How does your daily business operation function? In all honestly it isn’t a matter of if it goes out… it’s a matter of when. This isn’t meant as a scare tactic, it’s just a reality.

More than $26 billion in revenue is lost to network downtime each year. That’s why it’s so important to have a plan in place BEFORE you have an outage. Here are three things to consider when you are choosing how you will make sure your systems don’t go down.

Availability & Reliability

All wired solutions – whether a DSL line or a dedicated fiber line are geographically limited and not even available in some rural locations. Businesses also need to consider that most wireline providers guarantee at most 99.5% up-time which means you will see 3.6 hours of downtime per month. Most wireline providers also share the same wiring centers as local phone and cable companies. This means if one hard-wired connection fails there is a high likelihood the secondary connection will fail as well. Repairs could take hours, days or even weeks.

Wireless solutions are less susceptible to the things that can cause a landline outage and give you closer to 99.99% uptime. It’s pretty rare for there to be a cellular outage. Especially at the same time as your wireline outage.

Ease of Implementation

Wireline providers vary widely by region and often the primary provider in one area might not do business in another. When you’re rolling out a multi-location failover solution, this is a very important factor to consider, as companies will have to manage different contracts, invoices and support lines for each provider they engage with. Once a provider is selected and a contract is signed the business has to wait for the installation to take place. This could take days, weeks or even months if construction is needed.

When working with a wireless provider most locations can be connected with one provider, one contract, one invoice and one support line. Not to mention it can take a few days to get up and running instead of weeks or months.

Management

RCN Technologies’ technical expertise, vendor partnerships and operations team give our customers best in class support. You get a single partnership to handle order processing and post-sales support. Regardless of your business size, location or type, you need connectivity and consistency. We’re the value added managed service provider, and our job is to help you manage your network and make sure you stay connected. It starts with your primary internet provider. We work with over 100 wireline providers and have partnerships with the industry leading wireless failover hardware manufacturer. It’s called connection protection and we’re experts at managing it.

We take care of everything so you can focus on growth.