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How to evaluate a business internet Service.
There are so many offerings out in the market that it
can be
really hard to compare what they offer. How can you
decide which
internet service is right for you?
The key considerations are
a. Performance
b. Reliability
c. Support
d. Value Add
e. Cost
f. Data
Allowances
Key Considerations
a. Performance
To illustrate this we will use a 512/512kbps SDSL
(Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line) line as an example
though the points apply to any service.
When you sign up for a service of a particular speed,
you expect
to get that speed but things may still run slowly. The first
point of congestion is the local loop. Based on our
example, if
you are trying to download at more than 512kbps or
upload at more
than 512 kbps then you will create congestion on the
line. Your
performance may also suffer from traffic that you
didn't generate
such as worm traffic, hacker probes, SPAM and denial
of service attacks. For all of these problems, your ISP is not
really to blame. Where it gets interesting is looking at the next step
upstream.
Your line terminates in a DSLAM (DSL Access
Multiplexer ) in the
local exchange with many other services. From there
your ISP must
'back haul' all this traffic to their point of
aggregation (POA).
This backhaul costs money and every carrier will
take care not to pay for more than they need. But
how much is that? If they had 200 customers with a
512k service who all used their link flat out at the
same time they'd need about 100Mb/s of backhaul for that
exchange. That would be a 1:1 contention ratio and
very expensive. The actual situation is very
different. Most customers hit 100% utilisation
only for very short periods & average more like
5-8%during business hours. So a service is
considered business grade if the contention ratio on the
back-haul is 20:1 or less. Actually, the better
carriers don't use a fixed contention ratio, they
monitor the utilisation of the backhaul and add
bandwidth as needed to prevent congestion. For
example, PowerTel.
Stay away from
'residential
ADSL' where the backhaul contention ratio can reach
100:1 Does this mean that if you choose a
residential based
service you will
get what you've paid for? Not necessarily. Once the
data has been
hauled back to the carrier's main point of aggregation
(usually in
the nearest capital city) from all the exchanges in
the region, it
still has to get to 'the internet'. This is another
point of
possible congestion where ISPs can save money at your
expense. It
is relatively cheap for an ISP to buy their upstream
bandwidth 'by
the pipe', eg an unlimited 10Mb/s service where they
don't pay for
download. If their total customer base is paying for
a combined
throughput of 500Mb/s then, in the example, they've
oversubscribed
their bandwidth 50:1. This may be OK for residential
users who
aren't online often but will not be acceptable for
businesses.
Our SHDSL and Ethernet service does not get squeezed through a
pipe like this
- we pay for every megabyte which gives us priority
and we are
connected directly into their core internet at wire
speeds. It is important that business internet customers ask
questions to
check on both bottlenecks.
b. Reliability
Although reliability has improved enormously there are
still
outages and there are differences between carriers. To assess
this you need to know who owns and manages the DSLAM
and whose
infrastructure you are traversing. Carriers such as
Powertel and XYZ (Optus) have a better track record
of uptime
and better service guarantees that suit business
connections. If you choose ethernet, then your
reliability increases even further as most Tier 1
providers have a lot of redundancy built into their
networks.
c. Support
Check Service Level agreements & availability of
support to
trouble shoot your service. Do you need your routers
managed?
Under maintenance? What do you do if your router dies?
When can you call for tech support?
d. Value Add
Apart from the above, what features should you
consider?
Powertel exchanges can handle symmetric services-
something
essential for offices running VPN & ecommerce. can
your current
service provider do this? Is Voice over IP something
your
business may need? Is traffic prioritization
necessary?
e. Cost
In summary, you get what you pay for. Cheaper
bandwidth usually
means inferior bandwidth that may cause time sensitive
traffic to
suffer. Also, costs are falling so don't sign
contracts for
more than 12 months and review you carrier regularly.
However, if
you are on an private IP network, consider a 2 year
contract
minimum otherwise the initial costs of the hardware
and
installation is too high for only 12 months use & to
return a
significant ROI.
f. Data Allowances
Many ISP's
will offer a set amount of pre-paid data usage with
their plans and prices of upto $70 a GB for any excess
usage. That can add a huge cost to your bill if you're
not careful. At Shiftreload, we only offer unlimited DSL
plans, so that you never have to worry about reaching
your dowload limit. Unlimited downloads and uploads on
your DSL service is worth every cent and can save you
thousands of dollars in unmonitored, excess usage bills. |
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