Business fiber for warehousing & logistics in Arkansas

A warehouse is a large metal building full of wireless devices where every scan has to reach a cloud system immediately.

Arkansas moves an enormous amount of freight for its size, and the reason sits in the northwest corner: a national retailer, a national poultry business and one of the largest trucking companies in the country, all within forty miles of each other. Distribution facilities here are frequently large, frequently outside town, and frequently running cloud hosted warehouse systems that stop the operation when the network stops.

Where we see this most in Arkansas: Springdale, Bentonville, North Little Rock, Fort Smith.

What is driving the bandwidth requirement

• Warehouse management systems hosted in the cloud, where a scan that does not register stops the process
• Handheld and vehicle mounted scanners across a large floor area
• Automation, conveyors, and sortation reporting continuously
• Yard cameras, dock cameras, and gate systems
• EDI and carrier integrations running on a schedule that does not tolerate delay

What the connection actually needs to do

• Symmetrical bandwidth with headroom for continuous device chatter
• A second circuit, because a warehouse that cannot scan cannot ship
• Wireless coverage engineering inside the building, which is a separate problem from the circuit
• Low latency to the WMS host, which sometimes argues for a direct cloud connection

The mistake we see most often

Treating the internet circuit and the in-building wireless as one project. A gigabit at the demarc does nothing for a scanner in a dead zone at the back of the racking.

Arkansas carriers that fit this profile

The right carrier depends far more on your address than on your industry. That said, these are the Arkansas options worth having in the comparison.

Cox Business Cable and fiber AT&T Business National fiber and ILEC Windstream Enterprise Regional ILEC and managed services Comcast Business Cable and fiber Zayo Wholesale and enterprise fiber Ritter Communications Regional fiber

Warehousing & Logistics connectivity in Arkansas: common questions