Connectivity to the Internet is a key element to most business's today, an outage can slow or even halt operations, take your phones off line, prevent you responding to clients or processing orders.
Businesses depend on their Internet connection
A slow or prohibitively expensive Internet connections can be detrimental, unreliable connections are unsuitable for VOIP and can limit the introduction of cloud based services which in turn can result in higher costs, limited growth and a frustrating experience for staff
Business's often find themselves lost, confused and out priced when looking for reliable business connectivity. In a competitive market its hard to see the wood from the trees with a see of acronyms what's good and what's not and why Home broadband is seemingly so much cheaper
Technologies
ADSL -
Sends signals over your copper phone line, it can be good for downloading but not uploading, in the event of a fault BT aim to fix it within 2 days and it can be heavily contended (shared up to 50:1), not suitable for business.
BT will either hand your line over to your ISP in the exchange (LLU) or route it over their own network to a central point called a central pipe where its handed off to the provider.
With the central pipe providers pay for a pipe size and also for every GB transmitted, this makes it more profitable to have as many users per pipe as possible with a little traffic as possible. This suites smaller providers
With LLU your provider will normally have their own connection to the exchange, this means they can control the contention and traffic. The cost of connecting to the exchange is significant so its beneficial for your provider to have as many customers on an exchange as possible. This business model has pushed down the price of home broadband. Providers only tend to LLU the larger exchanges (For the most potential customers)
EFM -
Is very similar to ADSL, (its normally VDSL) however rather than using a single copper pair (2 wires twisted together) they use multiple copper pairs (up to 8 wires or 4 pairs) this means you can have symmetric bandwidth (i.e Same download speed as Upload Speed) this is important for business usage. The line goes back to the exchange (same as ADSL) You can add pairs to upgrade up to 35Mb (depending on distance of course)
The contention (If by BT) is limited to 8:1, with LLU you'll be sharing backhaul with residential customers which is fine for office use and VOIP applications. Typically priced from £170 per month upwards
GTTC -
GTTC (Gigabit to the Client) is unique, Gigabit means 1000Mb/s, so 28 times faster than EFM. We do this at our Green Spots, not the exchange, these are based much closer to the serving customers premises, this means our standard speed is 1000Mb/s with some customers on 200Mb/s. We don't have 'up to' speeds, our deployment is bespoke meaning customers get a fixed known fully symmetrical speed, 1000Mb/s up and 1000Mb/s down. We can sell bandwidth in 50Mb chunks from 50Mb to 1000Mb/s and everything in between. Our Green spots are just to serve business, GTTC is not available for residential properties. We install Green Spot's in areas suffering from poor availability from existing technologies and a 50Mb/s connection with us costs less than 35Mb/s EFM circuit.
Leased Line or EAD -
An EAD Leased line, this is fibre end to end, either at 100 or 1000Mb/s dedicated to you directly into your ISP's network, highly reliable
premium service, you can often choose a 1000Mb/s link but only pay for a portion of the bandwidth giving flexibility to upgrade and future proofing your needs. However it comes at a price, normally upwards of £400 per month for a 100Mb.