subject: Business Broadband Technical Aspects To Consider [print this page] Broadband can be fundamental to a business success. The majority of companies now use email as their main form of communication and retailers are also venturing online to accommodate the online shopping revolution.
The speed of your connection is a huge component for the productivity of you and your staff - To get the most out of your internet connection, youll need to consider looking at fast connections such as the new ADSL2+ broadband. This network offers speeds of up to 24Mbps in comparison to the original ADSL which is limited to speeds of only 2Mbps.
Uploading and downloading makes a difference too when using your internet connection for business purposes, the upload speed is something that will also provide increased efficiencies. You and your staff will no doubt be uploading content to your websites, unlike the home broadband user who mainly downloads information. Ensure when signing up to your ISP that they offer a high upload speed as well. In special cases, ISPs can offer their customers upload speeds of up to 600Mbps.
Traffic levels or contention ratios can easily affect the speed of your bandwidth. If there are many users sending emails with large attachments and the like, this will ultimately slow your internet connection right down. When assessing your ISP, find out what the contention ratio is the lower the better.
Security options are another factor in which to consider. Many ISPs today are offering anti-virus software as an added extra with their packages to ensure that their customers have total peace of mind. Do some research into your current business software though as many allow you to allocate data to online storage space to back up your information, should anything happen to your computers or servers, like flood or fire.
If you have an online business that runs live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, youll need to discuss the guarantees your ISP offers, should something go wrong. These guarantees often relate to the turnaround time that it will take to fix a system error or bug. Also be sure to discover what kind of operator assistance is available if you encounter a problem if youre on hold for 45 minutes waiting to get technical assistance that can hardly be time well spent for your business. Finally, when it comes to service levels, downtime percentages should be reviewed before committing to anything as this will give you a high level overview of how often they have issue and how they handle them.
Wireless networking or Wi-Fi is another technical aspect that needs to be considered when engaging an ISP. Theres only so far one network connection can be stretched, so understanding wireless networking capabilities will allow more staff to use the internet at the same time and ultimately get more work done in a shorter period.
