subject: Cloud Services And Voip, Will They Truly Take Off With Vdsl & Fwa In South Yorks [print this page] IP Telephony (VoIP) and Cloud services such as Hosted Desktop are network performance sensitive. Lack of performance and perceived connectivity risks are acknowledged to be holding the industry back.
1) Network performance
2) Connection Reliability
Network Performance
For sensitive services such as hosted Voice over IP and remote desk top applications is too often unreliable. Latency, jitter and packet loss are frequently too high, and end to end network management of call paths too difficult and reliant on too many service providers.
Connection Reliability
VoIP telephony, hosted voice and cloud services are a great idea until the network connection goes down, then everything stops until Internet access is resumed. At least when the desk top is local, an employee can carry on working on documents and email.
Whilst it is true that data network performance is improving, this zero sum game of connectivity is holding back many businesses form using remote applications and services, especially those in the SME community.
Will these two big inhibitors be removed with the combination of South Yorkshire Digital Region & Fixed Wireless Access?
South Yorkshire Digital Region (SYDR) is one of the largest public sector led investments in broadband in the world and is the first region in the country (independently of BT) to deploy VDSL (Very Fast Digital Subscriber Line) across a major region.
VDSL is enabled by replacing the copper connection between the local BT exchange to the local BT street cabinet with Fibre, so it is also sometimes described as Fibre to the Curb technology.
It is more commonly known as 'Superfast Business Broadband'
Superfast Business broadband Internet speeds over copper telephone lines can reach up to 40Mb/s download speeds and up to 15Mb/s upload speeds.
Delivered over copper phone lines in the ground, Superfast broadband delivers great value for money. Available int he following SYDR areas;
Sheffield Rotherham Doncaster Barnsley
Unlike BT Openreach, one of the big benefits of an independent deployment of VDSL by South Yorkshire Digital Region, is they offer their business ISP partners advanced performance guarantees. These encompass issues such as jitter, latency and packet loss thereby enabling end to end monitoring and troubleshooting for performance sensitive services such as hosted desk top and VoIP.
Also unique to the South Yorkshire region is the availability in Sheffield and Rotherham of a Fixed Wireless Internet / WiMAX service which provides a truly independent Internet and broadband data access network.
The combination of South Yorkshire Digital Region and On-Communications FWA / WiMAX network diversely routed networks could truly enable businesses to take advantage of performance sensitive hosted Voice and Cloud Services with the peace of mind that service won't be lost because of a connectivity fault.
Time will tell if other reasons prevent businesses in the region from taking advantage of these next generation IP services, but for now, its Advantage South Yorkshire!
