What options possible for faster broadband.

I have been asked to investigate what alternative broadband options are available for a company in Leigh (Nr Wigan). They are part of a multinational company that uses a centralised internet based accounting system and VOIP for communications. They currently have two ADSL lines providing 2Mbps download each at best and the VOIP phones are proving to be very unreliable (as I warned they might be). Their ISP is BT.

A cheap initial step might be to try converting the lines to an LLU provider and benefit from the higher upload speeds which might make the VOIP phones work better.

Could they have a high speed leased line installed? Where or who could it link with to provide internet access. They seem to think it would cost about £8,500 per year for a fibre from BT but no one appears to know what that was for.

Anyone got any suggestions other than move somewhere else?!

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Jun-10 19:49:51)

Most of the business oriented ISP's can provide leased line IP access, e.g. BT business, ZEN, easynet, Griffin, Claranet, to name but a few.
Being part of multi national should mean they have account managers with one or more teleco's to discuss this sort of thing.

Hi,
A leased line could be the answer, but it really depends on budget, ADSL is never a great options for large companies that have mission critical applications and services that run over them.
Costs for leased lines vary depending on location and bandwidth required and can vary by a lot.
Best thing would be to get a couple of quotes from different suppliers (don't forget to ask us for a quote as well) and then when you have a few quotes pass them over to the FD along with the benefits and also the downside with ADSL only and see were it goes from there.
We do normally see that when the bean counters look at ADSL and leased line ADSL wins every time until there is some outage lasting a couple of days, then very quickly a purchase order is filled out for a leased line!

Thanks for the reply.

I probably should have given some idea of the size of the operation. Althiough it is a multinational company with a common accounting system and standardising on the use of VOIP, the UK office only has about 7 or 8 personnel doing a variety of jobs (e.g. a couple on sales, a couple doing accounts and order processing etc.) so the requirement is modest but the reliability is important.

They got it into their heads that they want a fibre optic connection, which I think they may have done in other countries, and asked me to manage it for them as I do some of their IT work and installed their network when they moved in. I'm not familiar with what is available so I'm on a fast learning curve!

Ethernet in the Final Mile (EFM) is one option

see http://aaisp.net.uk/ethernet.html it has an online quote tool.

with 2mbit download, there is little scope for increasing upload through llu.

In reply to a post by Olly232:

I probably should have given some idea of the size of the operation. Althiough it is a multinational company with a common accounting system and standardising on the use of VOIP, the UK office only has about 7 or 8 personnel doing a variety of jobs (e.g. a couple on sales, a couple doing accounts and order processing etc.) so the requirement is modest but the reliability is important.

That is very similar to our setup. There's five of us here but it's a team of software and hardware developers. The corporate IT guys claim they have a quote ready to go for a leased line but when I queried it I was surprised to discover it would be going over the same ADSL lines we currently have (3Mb/s and 2Mb/s). The only advantage I can see is that it means they won't need a VPN and our internet traffic will go via their POP where it can be monitored. Rather strangely though they said they want to move us to VoIP (we currently have an ISDN solution).

Tbh I'm rather pleased that the whole thing has been suspended. Our parent company has just been sold for a billion-and-change so for the next couple of months the bean counters are too busy counting their beans.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 22-Jun-10 11:39:35)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

That is very similar to our setup. There's five of us here but it's a team of software and hardware developers. The corporate IT guys claim they have a quote ready to go for a leased line but when I queried it I was surprised to discover it would be going over the same ADSL lines we currently have (3Mb/s and 2Mb/s). The only advantage I can see is that it means they won't need a VPN and our internet traffic will go via their POP where it can be monitored. Rather strangely though they said they want to move us to VoIP (we currently have an ISDN solution).

Similar indeed. My lot decided not to refurbish their aging ISDN equipment for around £3.5K and go for VOIP to supposedly save money. They didn't test it properly before pulling the plug on the ISDN lines and now want to throw nearly £1K per month at it to make it work.

We looked at it, but too far EFM will only give them 2MB, and although 2MB leased line is better than 2mb DSL, still might not cut the mustard

An ISDN30 (2 meg) (sure the names have changed since I last ordered one..) should manage provided the data throughput is not massive and the setup has decent QOS for the VOIP.
Not a cheap option though as if you only have a 2meg ADSL connection, it would most likely mean the ISDN30 would need to be delivered via fibre. If so I'd be looking at other options which are delivered via fibre.