Achieving excellent internet speed and low latency can break down the barriers to productivity and unlock value for almost any business. But without reliability, speed doesn't matter very much.
Just as it’s no good having a good product if you don’t have enough employees to sell it, superfast broadband speeds are only useful to a business if they can be relied upon. Many organizations over-invest in superfast headline speeds without considering this and end up tied to an internet service that is fast but flaky.
Across the UK, poor reliability has a big impact. Research by Uswitch found that 11 million overall UK customers experienced broadband outages lasting at least three hours between 2021 and 2022, with a total financial impact of £1.3 billion on the UK economy.
It’s up to business leaders to ensure that when their employees come to the office, they can reliably connect to the internet and complete their work undisturbed by poor latency, slow downloads, or outages.
When your internet connection is unreliable, it’s not just your leaders or workforce that will bear the brunt of this. Poor performance always finds its way along the chain to partners and customers; finding a solution that means you can be there for your customers when they need you is as much a matter of reputation as it is revenue.
Direct leased lines offer the most reliable internet connection alongside the highest speeds, with upload and download rates ranging from 50Mbits/sec to 10Gbits/sec. They provide symmetrical connections, allowing firms to make use of identical upload and download speeds and work that requires any level of connectivity done to the same high measure regardless of the time of day.
Guaranteed fibre and bespoke maintenance
Because leased line fibre involves a business making a direct contract with an internet service provider (ISP), it comes with guarantees and services that are not standard for every internet contract.
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For example, the ISP laying fresh cable specifically for a customer helps to prevent any hardware problems in the immediate future and ensures that the specifications meet a client’s needs exactly.
In the unlikely event that a business’s leased line does go down, technicians can also react with haste and work with the affected business to resolve the problem as soon as possible. Unlike businesses that share a cabinet with other firms or even residential addresses, those on leased lines can be served on a 1:1 basis by their supplier.
Through BTnet, businesses get a 100% uptime guarantee to make sure that vital services stay running at all times and employees don’t have to sit idle. Alongside the symmetrical connections of the leased line, this means employees can do their work with total confidence in fast connectivity with the lowest possible latency.
Business leaders who choose BT for their leased line will have direct contact with BT from the day the line is installed, rather than relying on a third-party supplier. This begins from the moment a contract is agreed
If something does happen to affect availability, BT offers 24/7 support and technicians will be dispatched to address issues within five hours. In this way, a business’s losses can be reduced even for more severe internet outages.
BT has backed its confidence in BTnet with a promise to reduce the rental charges for customers who experience an outage. Rates are set out in the SLA and can reach the equivalent of ten days’ rental charge for hours lost to outages.
Guaranteed speed
Because a business doesn’t have to share its connection with others when on a leased line, it will never lose out by having to share bandwidth. With a direct leased line, there are no periods in which a business has to deal with slower broadband due to the time of day or the intensity of a neighboring company’s internet habits.
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This frees leaders to adopt or maintain flexible aspects to their working day, including asynchronous collaboration, without the need to predict the time at which the internet will be fastest or anticipate potential slowdowns and outages at a specific time caused by a bottleneck in their business broadband.
A direct leased line for fibre can ensure that an internet connection is maintained all day and night without the need for more staff and whenever an employee needs the internet in the office, it’s there to be used.
The leaders at Castle Grove, a nursing home in Devon, contacted BT to conduct a digital transformation project on its site linked to resident internet demands and its own pugs for a more resilient and convenient WiFi system.
BT sent a local business expert to Castle Grove, to tailor the project to meet the needs of the nursing home. It found that a dedicated leased line would allow Castle Grove to rapidly improve the quality of data transfers taking place on-site. The reliability and guaranteed bandwidth allow Castle Grove to deliver consistent digital services to its residents, in the same way that one’s employees can make use of solid fibre without breaks.
Castle Grove also experiences fairly regular power failures and there was a prolonged period after each power outage in which its internet connection struggled to reassert itself. BTnet means that once the power cut is resolved they are back online extremely quickly.
The reliability of a direct leased line can be further enhanced through integrated cyber security controls. As your first line of defense against malware and other threats, your internet service is improved if it can independently screen against attackers before any additional security measures come into play.
Being able to repel attacks feeds directly into uptime guarantees, with the number of cyber attacks on UK organizations continuing to surge each year. BTnet customers have the choice to add a Cisco firewall to protect their internal network from malicious external traffic and URL filtering to prevent employees from inadvertently visiting unsafe content.
It also comes with resilience guarantees for the core network, which can help prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from affecting a business’s services.
In choosing BTnet, businesses can achieve the support they need while safe in the knowledge that multiple contingency plans are in place to keep services safe. Even in the most intense circumstances such as a cyber attack on a business’ connectivity, BT works to resume services as they were.
For more information on BTnet dedicated leased line options, click here.
