Broadband connectivity was supposed to be a revolution in
digital communications. In the late 1990s, businesses that wanted
high-speed internet access had to invest in expensive leased lines.
Smaller firms made do with ISDN, or continued to labour under the
tyranny of analogue dial-up. Broadband changed all that.
Suddenly, always-on internet access became a realistic
proposition for many UK companies, and over the past few years,
with a combination of local loop unbundling and increased
competition, everyone is at it. So, why are four in 10 businesses
unhappy with their broadband connection?
That is the finding from a survey on next-generation access from
the Communications Management
Association. The survey found that 41% of businesses using
broadband were unable to receive the level of access they required
owing to their geographic location.
A third of respondents also considered legacy infrastructure and
the last mile to be the main challenge for telecoms providers in
rolling out next-generation access to businesses. Three quarters
said that fibre would be the preferred infrastructure to provide
the necessary quality of service. In a mostly copper-based country,
that does not bode well. Is access for businesses really that
bad?
"The norm is 8mbps, but companies are rolling out 24mbps," says
Margaret Hopkins, principal analyst at Analysys Mason, describing
the downlinks available to mobile providers. She adds that, for the
most part, uplink speeds on conventional DSL-based business
broadband services max out at 256kbps. "People are also rolling out
Ethernet over DSL and bonded pair technologies, so you can get up
to 24mbps of Ethernet over Easynet [now acquired by Sky]. BT also
offers a number of leased lines using DSL. Your E1 line might end
up using DSL."
However, those downlink speeds depend largely on how far away
the business is from the exchange. In the US, even retail customers
of telecoms giant Horizon get up to 50mbps thanks to the company's
fibre to the home (FTTH) offering.
Higher speeds are available, although mostly to businesses that
share buildings with other firms. Analyst company Point Topic
estimates that 120,000 businesses
have access to fibre connections, but generally because they
are tenants of a larger building, which makes the increased expense
of fibre acquisition worthwhile.
BT, which thanks to its history as the UK's national telecoms
provider still provides most broadband connections in the UK, is
living largely in a copper world, although an announcement this
month could see that start to shift.
The company has been offering copper-based DSL Max connections
offering up to 8mbps of downlink speed. The introduction of its
21st Century Network calls for an upgrade to the broadband
infrastructure. Consequently, BT pledged to upgrade its exchanges
to ADSL 2+, which will meet (at least theoretically) the 24mbps
speed, and it has been trialing some connections this year.
Earlier this month,
BT pledged to invest £1.5bn in fibre connections. Most of these
will be backhaul connections, providing fibre to exchange boxes
across the country. The roll-out will focus on new developments
such as the Ebbsfleet estate in Kent for FTTH connections, which BT
says could offer up to 100mbps in download speeds.
However, running fibre to the exchange could still bring speeds
of between 40mbps and 60mbps to residential and business customers.
"When the fibre is rolled to the cabinet, BT wll start using
VDSL, which
uses higher frequencies to carry more data," says Adam Rumley, an
analyst at Enders Analysis. It represents a big step for the
company, which will also be opening up its fibre links to wholesale
customers, making it more likely to permeate throughout the
market.
There are other ways around the speed problem. For example,
ntl:Telewest Business, which is part of the Virgin Media Group,
recently launched
different class of service options for DSL lines. These
different classes guarantee latency times for specific types of
data, such as voice and video. There is also a dedicated class for
control signalling protocols such as SIP, and another for
multimedia video streaming, which the supplier says has a lower
latency requirement than real-time video media. Customers benefit
from three other classes of service for business-critical
applications, so that different application types can be guaranteed
bandwidth independently of each other.
Business broadband may not be as advanced as it is in some areas
of the US, but reforms are pushing performance ahead. Hopefully, as
digital communications become increasingly important for business,
the available speeds will grow to meet their needs.