Below is a complete Connectivity Assessment, start to finish. Same scorecard, same diagrams, same findings and costed recommendations a real client receives. Read it before you decide whether the report is worth paying for.
Summary. Northgate runs a contract machining operation where the ERP system, the phone system, and shop floor data collection all depend on a single internet circuit from a single carrier entering the building at a single point. The pricing on that circuit is reasonable and the carrier is a good one. The problem is not what they are buying, it is that they are buying only one of it. A cut fiber, a carrier outage, or a construction crew in the easement stops quoting, stops shipping paperwork, stops customer phone calls, and stops shop floor reporting at the same moment.
Every system Northgate depends on rides the same circuit, and there is no second path. Based on their reported gross margin per production hour, a full-day outage costs roughly $18,000 to $22,000 in lost production and expedited shipping. They have had four outages in the last twelve months, the longest running six hours. A backup circuit from a second carrier costs about $6,600 a year. That is a third of the cost of one bad day.
Most businesses this size have never had their services, contracts, and equipment written down in one place. That list alone tends to surface something.
| Service | Provider | Detail | Monthly | Contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary internet | AT&T | Dedicated fiber, 500 Mbps symmetric, /29 static block | $1,180 | Expires 04/2027, auto-renews |
| Hosted phone | RingCentral | 62 seats, rides the primary circuit | $1,426 | Month to month |
| Backup internet | None installed | $0 | n/a | |
| Analog lines | AT&T | Fire alarm, elevator, fax (fax shows no usage in 6 months) | $214 | Month to month |
| Firewall | Fortinet | FortiGate 60F, single unit, no high availability pair | — | Support expires 01/2027 |
| Core switching | Cisco | Two stacked access switches, office and shop floor on one flat network | — | Out of warranty |
| Total recurring connectivity spend | $2,820 | $33,840/yr | ||
Most businesses this size do not have one. It is usually the item that circulates internally longest after the report is delivered.
Everything below the marked link depends on it. There is no alternate path at any layer.
One carrier, one physical entrance, one circuit. Any failure upstream of the firewall takes the entire operation offline. Four recorded outages in twelve months, longest six hours.
When the circuit fails, customers cannot reach you to be told why. Hosted voice sharing a sole data path converts an IT outage into a customer-facing one.
Auto-renewal typically locks a further term at existing rates with no market test. The window to renegotiate opens roughly 90 days prior and is easy to miss.
A second circuit provides no benefit if the device terminating it fails. The firewall is currently as much a single point of failure as the circuit.
Machine controllers and office workstations occupy the same broadcast domain. A security concern and a troubleshooting one, cheapest to correct during other work.
$38 per month for a service nobody uses. Small, but representative: nobody has reviewed the line inventory in years.
Two carriers, two building entrances, two access technologies, plus a wireless path that does not depend on buried fiber at all. Failover is automatic and takes seconds, not a phone call.
Every recommendation carries a number and maps back to a finding. Two of them save money rather than cost it.
| Recommendation | One-time | Monthly | Addresses | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Add a backup circuit from a second carrier, entering the building opposite the AT&T entrance. Spectrum fiber, 300 Mbps. | $500 | $550 | 1, 2 |
| 2 | Replace the single firewall with an SD-WAN edge pair that fails over automatically. Without this, a second circuit needs a human to switch to it. | $3,400 | $160 | 1, 4 |
| 3 | Add 5G wireless failover as a third path. Not buried, so it survives the backhoe that takes out both fiber routes. | $350 | $95 | 1 |
| 4 | Calendar the April 2027 renewal now and open renegotiation in January. Market rate has moved since signing. | $0 | −$180 | 3 |
| 5 | Segment shop floor from office during the SD-WAN cutover, while the network is already being touched. | Included | $0 | 5 |
| 6 | Cancel the unused fax line after confirming no alarm or elevator dependency. | $0 | −$38 | 6 |
| Net change | $4,250 | +$587 | $7,044/yr |
What that buys. Recurring spend rises from $33,840 to $40,884 a year, an increase of about 21%. In exchange, no single carrier failure, no single device failure, and no single cut cable stops the business. Measured against a full-day outage at $18,000 to $22,000, and four outages already on record, the additional annual cost is recovered by avoiding roughly one bad day every three years. Northgate has averaged four outage events a year.
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