Hi, assistance would be v much appreciated! We’re a small design business (12 people) and have to move office after 6 break-ins in the last 2 years. Found a good office to move to (London Bridge) bust just checked the existing BT broadband speed and it’s 7mbps at best. We currently have 50mbps and that’s doable for our work. BT say they can’t install fibre or faster line, nor can several other suppliers because of the location and the nearest exchange.

Is it possible to run 4g for the team? Have spoken to a couple of suppliers who naturally say yes, you can have speeds of up to 50mbps but slight worry that the reality might be less!

Any experiences of this? I’m not tech savvy so go easy if it’s a daft qn!

Cheers

I would imagine 4G would be plenty fast enough. We have customers configured with 4G failover on there fibre connections and no one complains of speed issues when the fibre connection goes down.

Other options would be EFM (Multiple copper pairs bonded together) or wireless leased line from someone like Metronet

http://www.metronet-uk.com/products/wireless-leased-line/

COst might be a factor, once you tell people it’s 4G for business you aren;t going to get unlimited data for the same price as a phone from the high street

Er, I know you’re a small business, but there’s more to life than regular copper broadband or FTTC.

craig24 raises a good shout on EFM. Worth looking at – lots of competive prices out there (just don’t go to BT..!).

ETA: yes, you’ll find people out there who’ll do you a deal on 4G, but I reckon you’ll get worse performance for more money. It’s not the headline throughput, but the reliability of the connection and the customer support you get when it falls over.

4G for a business of 12 people will be a bit ropey. Latency will be higher, you’ll end up using Wifi to connect to a dongle which in itself won’t be as efficient as a cabled network etc etc

I would look for a provider who will put something in on a cable for reliability.

Agree 4G for 12 people would be challenging, howabout Gig fibre?

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Or just put multiple 7mpbs ADSL connections in and spread your team across them.

Or if you do go down the 4G route then howabout Relish

https://www1.relish.net/business

Don’t know anything about their quality, just seen lots of ads for them.

have a look at relish.. met one of the chaps at a seminar..

https://www1.relish.net/business

Doesnt look too bad.. would be interested in how it goes if you take it up

thanks all – much appreciated. We are talking to Relish … and will look into EFM

And Russell, the multiple ASDL connections … can you give me a bit more info on that option pls?

Thanks again

Multiple ADSL is quite a simple one, you just have multiple lines in and get a router that will bond them together.

You present a single gateway to your network but it balances the traffic across the multiple lines.

http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/adsl-bonding

http://www.eclipse.net.uk/products/connect/bonded-dsl/

We use the Eclipse bonded ADSL solution in somouk’s link above. It’s pretty cost effective and works pretty well for an office of 35 people – we are in the middle of Dartmoor and get around 20mb on 4 lines.

We also looked at EFM but it’s not currently available on our exchange – I’d be surprised if that was the case in your location though so may well be worth looking into.

There are a few ISPs out there that provide the ADSL bonding, Andrews & Arnold are another.

Agree with SJ’s comments above, the advantage of EFM is that it will give you symmetric speeds so your upload will be the same as your download. ADSL even bonded isn’t going to match the upload speed you’d get on a single FTTC (what’s being marketed as fibre broadband) connection.

All comes down to cost, and your requirements for upload/vs download.

Also perhaps putting some sort of Acceptable Usage Policy in place, either in writing or technology (or both) so that you can clamp down on heavy internet hitters if you do end up with a limited bandwidth solution.

great, thanks and really appreciate the pointers. Will start investigating.

Relish have just talked to us – said they need to check whether an installed dish will have a ‘line of sight’ to one of their centers and if so, then that suggest we could be having speeds of 100mbps across the team. But seems v expensive and need to look into it a wee bit …

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BTW I work for a telco – our B2B business has a real focus on SMEs, so would be happy to put you in touch with someone sensible from the relevant sales team to see if there’s anything suitable we can do for you.

Email in profile.

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