The SME guide to business connectivity

The technologies, in one paragraph each

• FTTP: fibre all the way to the building, high speed, contended, the default choice for most offices
• SOGEA: fibre to the cabinet and copper into the building, no phone line, a bridge where FTTP has not arrived
• Leased line: a dedicated symmetrical circuit with a contracted service level, for sites that trade over it
• 5G fixed wireless: quick to deliver, excellent as failover or as a temporary primary circuit
• Legacy copper products such as ADSL, FTTC-with-a-line and EFM: being withdrawn, do not buy

Contention: the number nobody quotes

Broadband bandwidth is shared with other customers. That is what makes it affordable and what makes it variable. A leased line is uncontended. If your performance complaints cluster at particular times of day rather than being constant, contention is usually the reason.

Service levels, in plain terms

A best-efforts product has no committed fix time. A leased line typically commits to a fix within hours and pays credits when it misses. The gap between those two is the real difference in price, more than the speed is.

Resilience without gold-plating

• A single circuit fails eventually; the question is what happens in the meantime
• 5G failover in the firewall is inexpensive and covers most single-circuit outages
• For critical sites, use two circuits from different carriers, entering the building by different routes
• Test failover deliberately, at least annually, and check that voice actually survives it

Voice sits on top of all of this

Once the phone system is in the cloud, connectivity is the phone service. Prioritise voice traffic on the router, keep jitter low, and make sure the failover path carries calls, not just email. This is the single most common gap we find in SME networks.

Buying well

• Check availability at the exact address, not the postcode
• Ask for the committed rate, the fix time and the excess construction position in writing
• Match the contract length to the building lease, not to the discount
• Review the circuit whenever headcount changes by a quarter, or when a major system moves to the cloud
• Keep an asset list of circuits, contract end dates and IP addressing, because nobody can find it in an incident