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Business Broadband

Home Working

If you’re relying on broadband for your work, you may need to think a bit more about your choice of provider. It all comes down to what the impact is on your business, if your broadband service was not working for a period of time.

Business broadband services are more appropriate for small offices and home offices, with larger companies opting for what are called ‘leased lines’ or ‘Ethernet circuits’. The difference between these is blurring somewhat with symmetric broadband services becoming more widespread. The key is understanding what you’re getting in terms of speed, latency, security and service level.

Key questions for business broadband

Here are some of the questions you should be asking when considering a broadband service for business:

  1. How fast a service do you need? — If you’re uploading a lot of large files, you may find a faster upload speed is more important than the download speed, so a symmetric service is important.
  2. How many devices will be using it? — If you have a larger office, your choice of router/wi-fi solution may well depend on how many users you have. Remember it’s not just how many people but how many devices.
  3. How technical are you? — Do you have in-house IT support to deal with problems like Wi-Fi in the building, or do you want a solution from your provider that takes care of this?
  4. Do you need a static IP address? — If you want to run some services like VPNs for staff to connect to the office, you may need to consider a static IPv4 address (or even multiple).
  5. What happens when it goes down? — All services are at risk of downtime in the event of technical problems, which could be equipment failure or fibre lines being broken due to vandalism, weather or accidents. Do you have a plan for a backup route via another technology?
  6. Who is responsible for your router and its security? — This becomes important if you’re CyberEssentials Certified, but all businesses should know who is responsible for making sure the router’s security updates are carried out and that it continues to be maintained.
  7. What service level can you get? — Broadband providers may be able to sell enhanced service levels in terms of resilience (like multiple technologies and line failover/bonding). Also they can sell better care packages, so your service will be fixed within a shorter time.

You also need to think about whether you want to offert guest wi-fi access, and how that’s managed securely.

Broadband for home working

Most people who work from home will use their home broadband connection, and this may be fine in most cases as you can usually go to the office if your broadband service breaks, however if you’re always working from home without an office base and your service is critical to your work, you should make some plans on how to deal with a problem.

Reduce Risk — If you can have multiple services at your home (e.g. BT Fibre and Virgin Media Cable), you will reduce the chance of having problems affecting both at the same time. You could also have backup power plans in place to keep you online for some hours in the event of a power outage.

Mitigate Impact — If a problem happens, how do you respond? Have you tested using your mobile phone as a hotspot for your day-to-day work (including all types of work, from routine browsing to video conferencing?) Is there a co-working space you can get to if you don’t have an office you can switch to working from? If you have similar issues to other friends, you could have an arrangement to work from their home as well.

Our ISP Listings

As we have introduced new ISP listings, we are currently focussing mainly our ISP listings on residential packages in the first instance, although our testing has included adding some business packages; however. we will be adding more business broadband services back on the list in the next few weeks.