Why you need to give Broadband more priority

10th March 2016

Recently there has been much fuss made after an area in Devon, called Luppit had no broadband service for a number of weeks as a result of a failure.

Luppit is a small area, where broadband speeds aren't that amazing in many parts to begin with, but when the service fails, the residents and small businesses in the area really felt the pain - the issues started in late January and took some weeks to get fixed. 2 weeks into the issue, the local MP got in touch with BT to try and get them to sort things out. it actually took a month for some customers to get back online.

The local residents also complained that they couldn't receive better connectivity or use alternatives, but how true was that?

The reality is that it is possible to get alternative forms of connectivity that are entirely free of the BT connection - so it doesn't matter what happens to the local BT service. For a business, not having resilience in your broadband service is an increasingly unwise move - the internet is crucial to many businesses today, so having a plan is also pretty important and can cost less than you think.

So what options were available:

4G Service - this is possible for some residents on at least 2 networks in the area - so having some form of 4G backup service is possible - whilst this may have issues if the underlying phone mast relies on the BT network, it is normally not affected for a number of reasons. Whilst it may not work for everyone, and it is likely you might need to avoid some types of usage (for example huge operating system changes, streaming audio or video) to keep the costs sensible, regular business usage isn't normally that intensive and certainly would work enough to keep the essentials going. By planning in advance and working with local specialists like ourselves you can have a system that just works, kicks in without effort and requires no messing around changing settings - your business can stay connected.
Satellite Connectivity - this is often restrictive as an "every day" solution, but actually having a basic satellite connection for emergency use isn't that expensive and can be provided to the majority of people - but whereas you can quickly get a 4G dongle and "get away with it" to an extent, you need to have proactively planned for problems to get a regular satellite connection in place. Speeds can be pretty decent in most cases these days, and costs aren't particularly charge - certainly if you have more than 2-3 staff unable to work, or trade online and thus can't operate and bring in revenue you would really quickly get your money back even if it only gets used once every few months.

For larger businesses with bigger budgets, dedicated connections can also help you - they do have a much larger cost of course, but generally speaking, relative to the lack of productivity for staff& loss of business, it's a very small cost overall.

Even when something less disastrous happens, it's always wise to have more than one connection - and at VPW we offer a range of broadband resilience services that are designed for Small Businesses, and Home/Residential Installations - such as shared houses that can deliver broadband that under normal operation is faster than the general options available, but also keep you operating through a good majority of typical fault situations - and best of all, they don't cost the earth.

By planning ahead you can avoid sudden loss of service, expensive disruption and the sheer frustration that happens once you realise your Internet & Broadband service is actually pretty crucial to your entire business operating!

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