Guide To Business Broadband

Applications

There’s no doubt that the ubiquitous availability of broadband has contributed towards a richer enjoyment of the Internet for many. Faster speeds result in information being presented on screen far quicker than the old dial up method of access. At the same time faster broadband has meant that more sophisticated applications that are content rich, i.e., resource and bandwidth hungry, now work much better. Fast broadband has opened up more business and networking opportunities for UK plc.

Distant Exchanges

The speed you receive on your broadband line is based largely on how far you are from the exchange, and the quality of your phone line, neither of which can be influenced by an ISP without physically installing a new connection at huge expense. As a result, most ADSL suppliers will be able to deliver the same speed to you as they all utilise the same copper wires that your phone line uses.

However, what you download, where you download it from, and how many people are also online at the same time all play a role in how fast your connection is.

The quality of your ISP’s network is more important than the headline speed. Telling customers what their speed is after a connection has commenced does not guarantee that speed in any way, which is as misleading as the ‘up to 8Mb’ issue.

Broadband Developments for 2009

One of the key areas where business broadband may change in 2009 is in the area of ‘bonded broadband’. This is the capability to ‘join up’ two or more broadband circuits to increase speeds. One such supplier who is seeking to gain a march on the competition is innovator in access solutions Tiscali Business Services.

With significant advances in the underlying technology to deliver bonded broadband suppliers such as Tiscali Business Services are readying a number of services for their business customers.

Product and Marketing Director at Tiscali Business Services Lance Spencer says bonded broadband brings two key benefits for users; resilience and faster throughput.

“Tiscali is looking at three different types of bonded broadband. Bonded Business Broadband means different things to different people, and indeed there are solutions to meet the needs of SMEs and then right up to Enterprise level.”

Tiscali will meet the differing demands of these market sectors with a series of bonded type products released at the end of 2008. These cater to the differing technical and budgetary requirements of the end user.

1. Resilience-Only Option

Although technically this is not bonding as we know it, it more than meets the needs of many end-users and is therefore relevant and very worthy of inclusion.

In this case there will be two lines into the premises the primary on LLU (Local Loop Unbundling - the process of allowing competing telecommunications operators access to BT telephone exchanges to install their own equipment and make a direct connection with the customer’s premises), Datastream or IPStream, (DataStream and IPStream are products used for the delivery of ADSL broadband products, but represent different degrees of involvement from BT. DataStream is a BT service that enables infrastructure providers to design and define their own broadband services and offer wholesale ADSL to other ISPs and large businesses. IPStream only allows you to buy a ‘white label’ ADSL service which has been engineered by BT. It is available in the speeds and contention ratios that BT has pre-selected) and a secondary backup line on IPStream. Under normal operating conditions all traffic will be across the primary line but in the event of failure will failover to the backup line.

This resilience-only option is a very low cost solution in terms of the hardware needed to deploy, but more importantly in the overhead required to support. A very simple, standard configuration which is ideal for a Prosumer/SME and the retail sector where a great amount of bandwidth is not necessary but continuity of connectivity is.

2. MLPPP Bonding