Network topology selection depends on the scale of the environment being served, from personal consumer setups to small offices to large enterprise organizations. Each tier comes with distinct technology requirements, cost considerations, and expectations for bandwidth and availability.
Business Scale & Topology
We're going to choose whatever topology is going to best fit our use case. One of the things that affects what our use cases are and what we need to do is what we're connecting to and what the scale of that business is. There's some terminology around business scale and what it looks like.
The first delineation that I want to go over is that there's businesses and there's consumers. A consumer would be like us in our personal lives. I have a phone that I use for personal use. I have an internet connection to my house that I use for personal use. So I'm a consumer at that point in time, and it's for my personal use and for more things like entertainment.
Then there's a business level. The business level is usually a much greater level, in that there are more people relying on it. For instance, if there's an internet connection coming to this building right here, there's a lot of people that are relying on that internet connection. Perhaps it's part of an e-commerce site, and if that e-commerce site goes offline, now they're losing money by the minute, by the second. So the business has a bigger need to make sure that there is more bandwidth that they need and there is a higher level of availability.
For that reason you have different topologies that service these different levels. You even have different technologies that service this. It would be really expensive to run a business-grade line to your home; it's much more costly to do it for a business than it would be for a consumer. It's one reason why some small businesses really try to get away with consumer-level lines, even though it's less quality — but it is quite a bit more if they want to make sure they have that stability and that bandwidth available to them.
Even within our businesses, there are different levels of topologies that we use and different equipment that we use.
One is the SOHO. SOHO is the small office home office. If we've got an office that we're working with and we're essentially working remotely, we call that a home office. Or maybe it's just a small storefront — so it's a small office. Really this just means our needs are quite small when it comes to a SOHO, a small office, home office. There's specific equipment that we use for it, and there are certain topologies that we'll use for that.
Then we have small and medium-sized business. Small and medium-sized businesses have different technology needs compared to an enterprise level business. Often you see enterprise level packages, enterprise level topologies, enterprise level services — and these are the big businesses that are operating.
What's this all to say? That's just all to say that our topology is going to be more complex as we go towards this enterprise level, and it's going to be more simple as we go towards the consumer level. Same thing with the services that we offer and the connectivity that we offer. Services for the consumer level generally are much less expensive but less reliable.
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