The internet connects the world, and as such, almost everyone is connected. There are so many ways to get online but is your business using the best one for its needs?
The market is saturated with suppliers and service providers but often too much choice makes it far more difficult to find what is best for your business needs and budget which is where The Silver Cloud Business can help.
Most subscriber line services (ADSL, SDSL, VDSL, FTTC and FTTP) are contended services, which means that groups of subscribers are bundled together and must share the connection at the exchange. Imagine it working like a motorway, when not many people are using it, everyone can travel at speed. The more people that use it, the slower everything goes as the capacity is shared. If too many people try to use it, the whole things slow down to a crawl. Contended services work on the same basis because not everyone is expected to be using them at the same time, so there is enough capacity to go around for everyone.
A large office, with lots of users in the building, may be sharing a contended service with other offices so whilst it is OK for domestic environments to share in this way (because there are so few in each house using the internet) businesses, by their very nature, have far more people connected to the internet and so more people all vying for the same connection capacity. There are business subscriber line services which have far lower contention ratios, but you pay for what you get.
Domestic subscriber line packages are typically 50:1 contention (50 subscribers bundled together to share the capacity at the exchange) whereas business packages tend to be 20:1, 10:1 and 5:1, each with varying costs. The lower the contention ratio, the higher the package cost.
Leased lines, internet connections that are symmetric and uncontended, are far more suited to SME internet needs and provide a robust and reliable speeds because all the bandwidth is available all the time, not shared with others, causing issues at peak times AND they cost less than you may think!
We are based in Salisbury, Wiltshire and the City is the first area in the UK to become a full fibre environment where every business and domestic property can access full fibre services, where the internet connection to the property is delivered over fibre. This makes for far higher connections speeds; however, these are still asymmetric connections (download speed is much faster than upload speeds) that are also still contended. However, the connection speeds and the bandwidth have increased significantly with connection speeds of 1Gbit/s which compared to ADSL average speed for 10Mbit/s is a 100-fold increase in download speed.
But what if you are not near a high speed internet service? What if you can only get slow speeds, what can you do then?
The Silver Cloud Business has helped many businesses in rural locations, or new build sites that have no services yet, by installing satellite based solutions. With services such as Space-X Starlink low earth orbit internet connectivity, you can now get affordable, fast, low latency internet connections, anywhere in the UK. All it needs is a clear line of site between the dish and the sky without any obstructions like trees, or buildings in the way.
If you would like more information about all the types of internet connections, speeds and service availability, give us a no obligation call, we are more than happy to help.
Sector / Charity
The finished project meant that the organisation is now running its IT systems on fully supported software and operating systems, with the latest office applications in a Hybrid cloud environment.
