Kevin Eld, Vice President of facility management for 360° Hotel Group, a Linwood, Wash.-based owner and operator of branded and independent hotels, discovered just that when he was shopping for connectivity solutions for a new location. Eld, who is responsible for all technology and oversees engineering projects for all his company’s properties, was challenged with selecting a solution for a SpringHill Suites location that the 360° Hotel Group had just opened in Bellingham, Wash.

Eld wanted to bring a full fiber cable into the new facility that would provide services all the way up to 1 Gbps to serve all the connectivity needs of the hotel’s guests and staff. His challenges were primarily cost-based in that he was not able to identify solutions that offered high enough speeds for the value he was seeking.

“The hotel industry used to be only T-1 but rapidly changed,” Eld said. “The price for bandwidth from major providers became ridiculous. A lot of them were charging $1400 to $1500 per month for 10 Mbps circuits. So we started looking at all kinds of different options.”

Ultimately, Eld decided on a service that offers a 100 Mbps Ethernet connection. That pipe provides enough bandwidth to serve the whole hotel for $1400 per month. His decision was driven by the value of the offering as well as the timely responsiveness to service issues, he said.

“That’s what you look for. No one wants to be on the phone with someone for four hours trying to solve a problem,” he said. “The ordering process was streamlined and the service level has been really good. And the Internet connectivity is outstanding.” 

The Power of Customization

How can a service provider offer more speed and more reliability for less money? The solution isn’t in an off-the-shelf offering, but rather a customized solution that’s tailor-made for the particular requirements of Sequoyah and other businesses. Those solutions are the result of a series of one-on-one meetings and a lot of research into customers’ very unique needs, followed by the creation of custom-designed and custom-provisioned network solutions.

The rapidly-evolving pace of doing business today demands rapidly-evolving business connectivity. One-size-fits-all, quite simply, just no longer fits. Winn’s problem was unique to Winn and required a customized approach to get the more reliable, faster and less expensive connectivity the company needed. Given the complexity of business connectivity needs and how much they vary from one business to the next, there just isn’t a single out-of-the-box solution.

Every form of service for businesses—from simple Internet connectivity to complex and extensive MPLS configurations—should get the same personalized treatment. Business customers should have the opportunity to explain their unique situations in depth to their service provider, and have the chance to ask the tough questions that will help ensure that their providers not only know what they’re doing, but also know that they have the right network resources in the right places to supply the most economical and capable solutions—for the price quoted.

How do such customized solutions get designed, built and delivered? By leveraging state-of-the-art optical infrastructure that’s reliable, flexible and dynamic enough to continually adapt to the changing needs of a broad range of customers:1)by being established in carrier points of presence to allow access to expansive fiber connections at competitive rates;2)by listening to the customer;and3) by not price-gouging the customer, but rather delivering a higher-quality service at a fair price .

When designed and delivered to order, optical networking facilities don’t have to be cost-prohibitive—in fact, they can be provisioned to provide far more customized, more reliable, and more scalable to businesses at a far better price point than the alternatives.