Last updated on June 5th, 2024 at 02:57 pm
Your broadband connection is one of the most important pieces of hardware you require in order to run any type business, it is essential you choose the right service provider and connection type.
Many service providers will advertise super fast download speeds for minimum costs, however this is very rarely achievable and there is a caveat in the claim which enables them to state this.
As businesses heavily rely on a quality broadband connection for their voice & data solutions, here are some options on how to ensure you have a stable and reliable broadband connection enabling you to trade without any issues
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Business Grade Broadband
If you are using the broadband for business then it’s essential you select a Business grade broadband, rather than a service targeted at home users. Despite the offerings for massive speeds on residential broadband, they simply aren’t robust enough to handle the high bandwidth nature of businesses needing to connect potentially hundreds of users to the same connection at the same time.
Download speeds heavily rely on the contention rate of service, this is basically means depending on how many users are simultaneously on the same exchange which are using the service your actual speed is defined by this.
Contention ratio
Contention is the number of concurent broadband connections sharing the same bandwidth capacity at the service provider side. By example, for a domestic style broadband, a contention ratio of 75:1 or 50:1, meaning that 75 or 50 broadband connections are being shared by one pipe at the provider at one time is common. This is normal practice and doesn’t usually cause any speed drops, however if a large number of the users sharing your pipe all start to use a ton of bandwidth at the same time; lets say all 50 users start to stream multiple 4k movies at the same time, then the provider’s systems could automatically throttle the speed down equally amongst those sharing that connection to balance out the load on the provider’s infrastructure.
With business grade broadband where the expected bandwidth is expected to be greater – contention ratios are more likely to be something like 20:1 or even 10:1 so there are greater overheads at the supplier side. Business users are (with their being the capacity for many more users on each connection) more likely to use even more bandwidth at once, so those systems need that extra headroom for scalability when data downloads ramp up.
Admittedly, contention ratio isn’t as important as it used to be as the impressive scale up of data infrastructure over the past 10 years has meant that providers can handle massive upticks in data requests much more easily, but it is still worth considering if you’re wondering why you might pay extra for Business Grade Broadband.
Think Broadband is an independent Broadband reviews website and lists the current up-to-date Business Broadband packages available in the UK.
Run two broadband connections
It is common now for many business to store and host documents, emails and even a full IP based phone system off a cloud based hosted server. It is essential to have a reliable and stable broadband connection to keep your bussiness up and running no matter what, so separating voice and data applications is a sensible failsafe to have, so if one connection drops, then you still have some method to communicate with your customers.
Annex – M ADSL 2
This allows the provider to sacrifice some of your download speed to increase the upload speed. If you constantly upload large size documents or use Voice over IP (VoIP) on your broadband connection, then Annex M will help this. If you have a requirement for especially fast upload speeds contact your Broadband provider, and mention Annex M, they should be able to accomodate you.
Lease line
Installing a lease line will guarantee you high up & download speeds as you are privately leasing the line and not sharing it with anyone else – using a lease line is generally the most expensive option however it guarantees the most stability and resilience out of all the options therefore you would improve productivity and efficiency it’s certainly an option to consider