In The Beginning There Was Dialup
The operations manager from the telecoms company asks the BT representative a question. Something that has been puzzling him for a while now. ‘So, what is this new ‘Broadband’ thing I keep hearing about??’n‘Broadband?’ responds the BT person, laughing like he’s been asked if Shakespeare was a real person. ‘Nothing for you to worry about, Broadband’s not for you’
a) He did really say this, and
b) At this time we were all using dial-up, the one that made the funny noise and took an age to do anything
It was a genuine question. If there was a new thing out there that would save us all, then why on earth were we not all using it? His reason for such an outrageous statement was as follows.
Upload/Download Ratio
Contention Ratios
Deployment
- Company A guesses how much Bandwidth is likely to be required in a particular street vs how much it is likely to sell.
- It installs just-enough and hopes to make a profit
- The first few people who become customers think it’s great. Superfast, fantastic, break open the twiglets!
- Then, as more people join, the slower it gets
- People start to complain and typically start relaying a 3rd party story from their uncle ‘Brian’ who used to work for BT
- The service provider then relents, and invests some more money into the underlying bandwidth
- The cycle continues
If you’ve ever found yourself saying ‘it used to be fine, but suddenly it’s rubbish’, or ‘it’s fine most of the day up until 3:37 then, strangely, it goes really slow’…then this is what has happened. Again, not ideal for a business that needs a reliable, consistent service.
SLAs
Leased Lines
To put this into context, the push-come-shove SLA for many Broadband services, even todays is 5-working-days! Put simply, Leased Lines are a service that your business can rely on, the sort of service that businesses need. So, what’s the problem, why aren’t all businesses using Leased Lines?
Cost
So Where Does That Leave Us?
- ‘Is my business online?’
- ‘Does my business stop if my Broadband (or IT) stops?’
If the answer to either of these is ‘yes’, then speaking to us will give you the tools to improve your business, plus excellent overall small business IT support. On a final note, it is not lost on me that ‘story’ part of my ‘story’ was quite short. I’m sure there’re conversation expanded on the theme and they went on to have a full and interesting discussion, but as I said, I wasn’t in the room.
Contact us today if you would like to discuss the best connectivity solutions for your business.