Dom Norton, Sales Director, Spitfire Network Services Ltd
Has your firm invested yet in increasingly popular business fibre internet services? In theory, packages available to the business world should offer a higher level of technical support and better bandwidth at peak times than those available for domestic use. However, many firms are finding that having bought into a business fibre internet service, the service level agreement leaves much to be desired. So, if your firm is currently investigating fibre broadband and ethernet, you should be aware of how the market offerings differ in crucial areas such as reliability, performance, and speed.
Fibre options
To better understand any variations, it is useful to understand how internet services are delivered to your firm’s premises. Currently there are three main ways that fibre internet can be delivered. Firstly, we have “Fibre to the Cabinet” (FTTC) which you will see marketed as ‘fibre broadband’. The fibre element of this service will be delivered to the local cabinet in the street but enters your premises as a traditional, slow copper network connection.
Next up we have “Fibre to the Premises” (FTTP) which is commonly marketed as either ‘fibre broadband’ or ‘full fibre’. Here in the UK, the majority of FTTP services are delivered using GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology. Essentially, this is considered a shared access fibre network which means that if other organisations are using it in the building or local area, your firm could suffer from slower response times – all depending on how many are using it at the same time.
Lastly, we have “Dedicated Fibre” which you will probably see marketed as ‘Fibre Ethernet’. Of the three options discussed, this service provides dedicated fibre straight into your firm’s premises for the sole use of your organisation. In other words, a Dedicated Fibre service is the most dependable fibre connection available to your firm today.
Don’t overlook service level agreements (SLAs)
It is critical that your firm pore over the SLA before pushing the button with any broadband provider. SLAs will set out, in writing, exactly what your firm is getting for your money, so make sure that you go over the service level agreement with a magnifying glass. The SLA should identify precisely when you can get support, for example is it just business hours or 24 hours? The SLA should also confirm the actual circuit performance that your firm should expect and define what maintenance support, repair times and compensation your firm will receive should the service not behave to your expectations. It should go without saying that any business broadband provider worthy of your investment has SLAs in place.
As specialists in business-class Wide Area Networking, Internet connectivity and SIP Voice over IP, we strive to understand where our customers require our expertise. With this in mind, we recently concluded a comprehensive survey amongst over 400 UK-based small-to-medium businesses (SMB) to gauge their knowledge on SLAs. Surprisingly, just over half of them (56%) actually knew what their SLAs were in relation to their internet connection performance and only one in four of them knew if their existing connection had any contractual SLAs at all.
Choosing the right product
However, an overwhelming number of respondents (79%) understood that knowing the SLAs for their internet connections would help them to choose the correct product for their organisation. It was also interesting to discover that UK SMBs want more transparency from providers when it comes to SLAs – 80% of respondents want SLAs to be clearly visible for all internet connections.
High performance fibre connections should include extensive SLAs that meet all of your firms’ needs. That means supporting any voice or video conferencing applications to eliminate latency or jitter (where possible). You should also see some kind of guarantee with respect to speed (important for those bandwidth sucking applications). You’ll also want to see flexibility in the contract, the ability to scale up with line upgrades should the firm be growing and quick turnaround times if things do need fixing. Oh, and you shouldn’t expect to see any data packet losses on the network.
With greater transparency from service providers, which means clarity and fairness when it comes to both Service and Performance SLAs, your firm is in a position to make a more informed choice and actually get what you are paying for. Even when considering Dedicated fibre/fibre Ethernet, one provider may be able to offer better guarantees than another, depending on the quality and design of their network.
You have a lot of choices when it comes to business fibre internet. Don’t get fooled or bamboozled by catchy buzzwords or marketing hype. There are different speeds, various access technologies and a busy marketplace of service providers. If you take a deep dive into the SLAs on offer with all of these wonderful options, your firm will be in a much better position to be able to choose a service that fits your needs for today and tomorrow.
