Broadband by its design is a contended service which means others compete for your bandwidth and the service will not always run as fast as you need it to. The old 20:1 and 50:1 definitions no longer apply and broadband traffic generally all ends up in the same pipe. The broadband networks were also designed for consumer / residential access and any business broadband connections will so far as connectivity at that local exchange is concerned will end up in the same pool of traffic as every other connection. Business Ethernet services conversely are just that, designed for business use, they offer high-speed, dedicated access – the service is 100% yours and runs at a constant speed all the time. Even if you are not using all your bandwidth it will never be allocated to another user on the network.
Atlas Business Ethernet services connect to the same core network as our broadband connections so you’ll continue to have the same high levels of onward connectivity to the rest of the Internet, and with Ethernet your latency will be even lower than broadband.
ISDN lines are expensive and thousands of companies every day are switching to Voice over IP. However traffic cannot be prioritised over standard broadband making it unsuitable for vulnerable applications like voice. On Ethernet vulnerable applications like voice and other real-time protocols can be identified and prioritised. This means that even if the circuit is running at maximum speed the integrity of prioritised applications cannot be compromised.
Broadband is an asynchronous service, that is its download speed is much faster by several orders of magnitude than its upload speed. Remember also that it’s not just the downstream traffic that is contended, your upload traffic on broadband will also be contended. With Ethernet you get the same speeds on upload as you do on download.
The care level on standard broadband is best-efforts, which means that if it fails or develops a fault it can be days before service is restored. Even with BT’s DSL Enhanced care days can pass before service is restored – if the fault is intermittent or a performance issue then unless that problem is evident with a BT SFI engineer is on site it is more likely than not the fault will be cleared down as no fault found. BT SFI engineer visits carry a significant cost too which would be billed onto the client.
Ethernet services carry a meaningful compensation penalty and as such will always have a higher priority with carriers. If the service breaks down or develops a fault you can generally expect it to be fixed within 7 hours. Furthermore the service is monitored remotely 24/7 so we will often identify and fix any degradation of service before you notice it and as mentioned before you have 24/7 access to specialist UK-based Technical Support.
If the continued welfare, performance, viability of your business is strongly tied to having a consistent, reliable, performing connection to the Internet then there should really be no question, you should be on Ethernet and not Broadband.