Running a Business with consumer Broadband

Running a Business with consumer Broadband

A couple of weeks ago, we blogged about how the development of internet connectivity and unified communications has allowed for flexible working. Today we follow that up with the minimum connectivity solutions all working locations MUST have.

I want to make this clear from the outset, I’m not asking every office and house to have an Ethernet Fibre Leased Line, far from it in fact. What I am recommending is that these locations should have a broadband circuit that is dedicated for business use. This can be ADSL, FTTC or Ethernet Circuits, whatever you can afford, but it is absolutely imperative that you it’s a dedicated business circuit for the following reason:

1. Service Level Agreement – Any business grade service will have a signed agreement by the company and yourself detailing exactly what it is that you are paying and what is an accepted period of downtime. I often see people sending threats to ISP’s on Twitter that they will be paying for any loss of earnings during a period of downtime. An SLA will cover and detail exactly what kind of compensation you can expect.
2. Static IP address – a further benefit of business broadband is that you will receive a static IP address. This means that instead of your IP address changing every time you connect, you will have one fixed permanent IP. Any downloads or uploads that you carry out will be undertaken using a consistent route instead of changing every time.
3. Business Priority Traffic – This may not be true of all business broadband suppliers, but I confidently speak on behalf of Stream Networks by saying that Business broadband will suffer from a reduced contention ratio compared to consumer broadband. All traffic will be earmarked as business priority traffic which will ‘push it to the front of the queue’.
4. Bandwidth Caps – Broadband that is being used for business will no doubt be more bandwidth heavy. With a dedicated business broadband circuit, you will not have to worry about how much data you are using as unlimited packages are common.