Is business broadband what I need?

I work from home full time which involves a lot of downloading/uploading data.

I also run a few servers at home, some are for business use.

I found residential ISPs to be unreliable so I tried to sign up for a business fibre with a few ISPs around here but none of them responded, I think it's because I live in a residential building. They're definitely available around where I live (London Zone 1 area).

Does anyone know if Colt, Vorboss, et al, would put through a fibre to residential building for business use? I'm not just looking for a reliable SLA, I'm also looking for a better peering with AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare and a few other ASNs - it seems that none of residential ISPs offering a business fibre also offer a better peering (i.e. community fibre and hyperoptic doesn't indicate they do and they don't have a separate business only ASNs).

Yes they will. Just be aware of all the terms you're signing yourself up to with a business provider. Consumer protections do not apply.

Be especially careful with CPI++ type annual price increases which are baked into very many business broadband and leased circuit contracts these days. Mostly (with few exceptions) gone are the days of fixed price for the multi-year term of the agreement.

It would be good to investigate what "unreliable" means here before recommending that a business provider will solve the problems.

You probably could get a leased line installed into a flat but it would be a very expensive process once all the legal paperwork has been completed with the building owner, it would almost certainly be cheaper to host your business services somewhere else either via colo or VPS or similar arrangements.

With regards to peering, most established providers are more than good enough in this space, I've not seen things take a single outbound path via Cogent for a while. Don't rely on public peering information, have someone on the service test it for you.

Some of your issues sound like they could be solved with an A&A L2TP service.

Edited by jpm (Thu 14-Aug-25 10:47:20)

In reply to a post by ym4y7ny4:

I found residential ISPs to be unreliable

Describe "unreliable"? What network and technology was the connection being delivered over?

It sounds like you might be thinking about several different things:

* Same technology (e.g. GPON FTTP) but "residential" versus "business" provider. The "business" provider may give you a better SLA - e.g. they may take Enhanced Care from Openreach - and/or better support. There are quite a few providers who offer the Enhanced Care option (e.g. Aquiss, AAISP, Cerberus). They'll likely use the same network for business and resi customers.

* Different transit providers (ISPs) and different access networks. You mention Community Fibre and Hyperoptic, but if you have Openreach FTTP available then it gives you a much wider choice of transit providers.

The quality of network operations varies from provider to provider, which will affect how many outages there are in their core network and how quickly they're resolved.

* Different access technology, e.g. dedicated leased line versus FTTP. This will give you a full symmetric 1G/1G (or more). The business providers will happily sell you this regardless of the building type, but whether you want to pay ten times or more as much is for you to decide. You may have Excess Construction Charges, and you'll likely end up with a three year contract that auto-renews for 1 year periods if you don't cancel it 90 days before the renewal date. And has already been pointed out, installation into an MDU may be problematic.

* Different ASNs: I'm not aware of any providers splitting their business and resi customers into different ASNs, and TBH they'd likely share the same transit ASN anyway: it makes no sense for them to have two sets of peerings, and I don't think this would have any of the advantages you think it does. All serious UK ISPs have tons of peering at the main exchange points like LINX and LONAP, and/or private peering, because it's financially in their interests to do so. If you want a "business only" ASN then you're best going for a provider who sells only business connections. But there's no guarantee of better connectivity.

Whether you count Community Fibre and Hyperoptic as "serious ISPs" is for you to decide.

Aside: if connectivity to AWS and Microsoft are critical, you can also buy direct connections to them. But normally you'd do that from a data centre.