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The northeast Michigan region offers several Internet connection options. The options vary by community. The table below shows the typical maximum speeds used by small businesses in Crawford County and Otsego County communities. Note that other speeds are available for several of these services and that pre-qualification is required to determine if a service is available at a specific location.

Download Speed	Upload Speed	Reliability	Type of Service	Otsego and Crawford County Communities Served
19.2 - 56kbps	19.2 - 33.6kbps	Poor	Analog dial-up modem	All communities
128kbps	128kbps	Good	ISDN dial-up	Gaylord
384kbps	128kbps	Poor	Two-way satellite (lowest cost)	All communities. Requires clear southern view.
384kbps	384kbps	Good	Fixed tower wireless	Gaylord, Waters, TreeTops area
512kbps	512kbps	Good - Very Good	Fixed tower line-of-sight wireless	Gaylord, Waters, TreeTops area
1,500kbps	384kbps	Very Good	DSL	Gaylord, Grayling, Lewiston, Johannesburg, Frederic, and Lakes of the North
1,500kbps	384kbps	Very Good	Cable	Gaylord, Michawaye, Vanderbilt, Grayling
1,500kbps	1,500kbps	Very Good	T1 or Frame-Relay to a local ISP Point of Presence (POP)	All communities
1,500kbps	1,500kbps	Excellent	T1 to an Internet backbone provider	All communities
45,000kbps	45,000kbps	Excellent	DS3 to an Internet backbone provider	DS2 requires a fiber connection. The cost of running fiber between a business and a Verizon central office can be high.

kbps - kilobits per second

EPCS has a working relationship with nearly all the Internet bandwidth providers in the region and can quickly research options for your location and pricing. EPCS sells DSL service in the region.

EPCS has tested and utilized a variety of Internet analog, ISDN, DSL and cable modems, routers and firewalls. There are several options for increasing both the speed and/or reliability of Internet access. In areas that don't offer low cost broadband services, slower analog and ISDN connections can be bonded to simulate broadband connections. Broadband connections, such as T1s, can be bonded to form very high speed broadband connections.

Affordable routers have recently come on the market that provide remarkable Internet reliability by simultaneously using two broadband connections (e.g. DSL and cable, DSL and wireless, cable and wireless, etc.). Since different infrastructure is used by cable, wireless and DSL Internet access, it's very unusual for any two of these services to be simultaneously down. The new routers will maintain Internet access (fail-over) if either service is up.

In-house servers require considerable IT resources, particularly e-mail servers. Often remote servers are much less costly, perform much more reliably than in-house servers and sometime offer features that are very difficult to implement reliably in-house. Examples include 24/7 operator availability, reliable and efficient backup and recovery, redundant hardware, redundant power supply, redundant Internet backbone connections, secure encryption services, e-mail virus filtering, e-mail spam filtering, reliable attack defenses, virus and intrusion defenses, WebMail, Web based database options, video and audio streaming, etc.

EPCS is generally familiar with hosting options available to businesses in the region and offers hosting services.

EPCS is expert at programming HTML, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL applications that run on Apache Web servers running under Linux. EPCS also offers limited C++, PERL, VisualBasic and JAVA development. EPCS supports Typo3 Content Management System applications.

EPCS has had considerable success optimizing websites for search engines. EPCS keeps current on search engine requirements and uses a systematic process for weekly monitoring of search phrase success on major search engines.

EPCS offers some LAN consulting services, but prefers to defer to other local companies that specialize in LAN design, construction and maintenance. EPCS has a working relationship with several local LAN design and maintenance companies.