- airfibre
- February 15, 2023
- 12:05 pm
Since 2008
Business Broadband. What do you need to consider?
If you are buying business broadband, you have a great deal of considerations that you need to factor in before making a decision. In this blog I seek to address the fundamentals that you need to consider including:
- What is business broadband?
- Is business broadband better than residential?
- Why is business broadband more expensive than home broadband?
- Can I use business broadband for home?
What is business broadband?
Businesses have increasingly distinct requirements of Internet services; driven by the migration to modern strategically important services. Most importantly, services that are uncontended (zero competition for shared bandwidth from neighbouring businesses and houses, for which generic Telcos target a ratio of 50:1) and support for fully symmetrical speeds (same upload speed as download speed) which, when combined with contention as is the case for entry level services, sees transmission rates drop from 100Mbps to as little as 200Kbps when pushing data out of your premises.
Key applications for today’s businesses where this has catastrophic impact include.
- Migration to the Cloud, where you have a requirement to push data out to off-site remotely hosted services just as fast as you bring it in.
- The massive trend toward home working, where staff need to pull files and data out from your business premises and into their homes.
- IP Telephony to avail of cheaper functionality rich services where you need to be able to make more than one or two simultaneous phone calls which require consistent levels of sufficient bandwidth and very low latency to ensure satisfactory voice quality.
Is business broadband better than residential?
Yes.
Business broadband services offer better security when bundled with a managed Firewall that is kept up to date and suited for purpose (more to follow in a later blog).
Business broadband will be terminated with a router made for business. In addition to out-performing residential routers, which are okay for possibly up to 12 or so devices are generally not capable of accommodating more devices, especially office-based systems that transmit and receive intense volumes of data.
Residential broadband services allocate dynamic IP addresses which change periodically, which in complicate VPN management, for example.
A business broadband circuit comes with a static IP address that essential for a host of business-specific features that are critical to the day-to-day operation of businesses.
Providers must give you a contracted Service Level Agreement (SLA) that holds compensational teeth should the service fail to meet service availability and performance parameters.
The SLA dovetails into support that is proactive to your needs and, as in the case of Airfibre, gives you access to expertise that can assist you in determining whether or not the Internet circuit is the root cause of problems that may arise from time to time.
Providers of low-cost broadband services can be impossible to engage with if things go awry. You might be waiting for an hour or more to talk to someone on the phone only to establish that they are hopelessly ill equipped to provide any meaningful assistance. The value of this comes when you encounter problems or perhaps suspect you are having problems.