What should you look for from a Broadband connection

Apart from cost, the two obvious considerations are the reliability and the capacity offered by each supplier.

Generally, ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) see ADSL / Broadband as a low end offering and therefore offer no service level guarantees. If your connection goes down therefore you should have a contingency in place. This could be as simple as the ability to connect via and existing ISDN or dialup connection to collect mail etc. If your business is currently using a dial up account it is unlikely that you will have any guarantees at the moment so adding ADSL will actually improve the resiliency of your internet and email provision. You should however consider the level of support offered and what is actually meant by “support”.

The capacity offered will have three parts, the upload and download rates and the contention ratio. Generally speaking the bigger the download rate, the faster you can surf the internet and download email and files. The upload rate is usually a lot lower than the download figure but will likely only be an issue if you have a web site that is going to have a large number of visitors or users downloading a lot of data from it. A typical business offering would be 1Mb/s download and 250Kb/s upload bandwidth.

The contention ratio is typically quoted in the format 20:1. This means that is you have a download capacity of up to 1Mb/s upload bandwidth this would be potentially shared with 20 other users. This is only an issue if all 20 users are trying to download large amounts of data at the same time – in this case all 20 users would have to share the 1 Mb/s available.

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