Residential Broadband Specialist
In our experience, this is always the biggest issue for any business, big or small – The ability to connect to the internet or the actual speed or the quality of the actual internet connection itself. This is the same if on a rural farm in Devon or if running a call centre in the centre of London.
These two examples have two very different issues at two ends of the spectrum but none the less it is the same issue for both businesses in terms of a quality connection to the World Wide Web.
At Marley Comms some of the services we provide are:
- Leased line broadband circuits
- E.F.M broadband circuits
- ADSL Broadband
- “Fibre” Broadband
- 3G & 4G mobile data solutions for your business
- Broadband Consultancy
Here are the options with an honest opinion of what to expect:
Analogue Line and ADSL Broadband
If you do not want particularly fast speeds and you do not wish to utilise VoIP or a hosted solution and you are within a few kilometers of the local telephone exchange, then you may get by with this conventional connection – A contention ratio of 50:1 (50 to 1) is common, meaning that at peak times you will be sharing with up to 50 other businesses or users in your local area. The uploads on these types of connection are lower than the download speeds.
Analogue Line & "Fibre Broadband"
We use the term fibre broadband loosely..! You will receive better speeds on average but you will not see any fibre optics to your premises, this is because although your network provider has Fibre to the local telephone exchange or to a street cabinet nearby it is still presented to you over a copper cable with an analogue telephone line. You need to be fairly close to a local exchange, lucky enough to be in an area that is supported and you will also be on a contention ratio of 50:1, although you will have “mega” speeds from time to time, there is no consistency in this product especially when everyone is using it in the area at peak times.
Satellite Broadband
This is an option for anyone who cannot get broadband via any of the other routes. You may be situated in a very rural location and several kilometers away from your nearest BT telephone exchange meaning that the distance your broadband travels over the copper telephone wire isn’t worth even contemplating by the time it reaches you. However our experience of this product is that although it is reliable, its latency, expense and over selling which causes the saturation of the actual satellite and means that you pay a lot of money for a poor service, especially at peak times. We wouldn’t particularly recommend this product through experience, although sometimes it is the only route to the net.
3G or 4G modems
This is sometimes overlooked as a route to the internet and in some cases our clients are in quite favorable positions where 3G or 4G mobile data is available, with a careful survey and installation of some hardware this can be sent to a router and distributed throughout your business or home and is much more reliable and cheaper than any of the other options available to you. We have gained some valuable experience in this field and we also advocate such technology.
E.F.M & Leased line services
(True Fibre Optic Solutions)– These are the ultimate in connectivity but they come at a cost, you will ordinarily receive a Service Level Agreement with a 6 hour logical fix for this kind of managed internet feed, although the likely hood of the actual fibre optic to your premises being down is very low. If you rent a 10Mbits/s (megabits a second), 50Mbits/s or 100Mbits/s feed, this is exactly what you will get 100% of the time. This is a “pipe” which means you can upload at your given speed as well as download, so a 50Mbits/s circuit will give you 50Mbits/s upload and 50Mbits/s download. These are on a 1:1 contention ratio which means that only you use the feed at all times…!
The last option is the preferred method for VoIP and we would not recommend a customer facing solution on any of the other connection, voice compression on any level has its draw backs and these need to be considered very carefully. We are consistently dealing with clients who have made the switch to a hosted IP solution and are very readily looking to make the switch back to a traditional telephone line solution sometimes at a great cost to them. We would be happy to discuss the pros and cons of this type of telephony.
For more info on VoIP and telephones click this link
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