What are the advantages/ benefits of Business Broadband?

While larger companies opt for Internet Leased Lines, smaller companies cannot always afford them and hence they might want to go with Broadband. While broadband is a good option, it is important to remember that business broadband connections that are specifically tailored for businesses, have certain advantages over home broadband connections. Let us look at some of them, in this article.

Of course, Internet Leased Lines (ILL’s) are quite expensive but their prices are coming down rapidly and Internet Leased lines have a lot of advantages over business broadband connections. But still, companies prefer broadband connections because of their increasing capacity with competitive pricing. Since most of the employees primarily download stuff from the Internet, it might be sufficient for many companies as broadband connections offer good download speeds. Companies could also consider having a broadband connection in addition to ILL’s for fail-over / load-balancing.

There are two types of broadband plans – Home & Business. Of course, there are many ways of accessing broadband and you can read about them here. The cost of business broadband connections are slightly higher than home broadband connections, with good reason. Depending on your service provider, you might get some/ many of the following features offered by business broadband:

• Reliable connections with SLA – Service Level Agreements.
• Faster, priority, 24×7 Call Handing and support. Faster response and resolution times.
• Option for Higher bandwidth rates/ Faster broadband connections.
• Unlimited plans at faster download speeds.
• Higher bandwidth/ data usage cap for limited usage plans.
• Static IP address(es).
• Multi-user access with comfortable speeds.
• Email addresses/ storage space/ domain hosting.
• Sharing of broadband lines with fewer customers for better performance.
• Scalable broadband plans that can be upgraded / downgraded quickly.
• Online user interface / Dedicated account manager.
• Faster service / better experience during peak usage hours by prioritizing business traffic.

Some Internet service providers offer innovative broadband plans for businesses like,

1. Symmetrical Upload / Download connections;

2. Higher Upload / Lower Download connections.

These type of plans might be very useful for companies in specific scenarios like hosting their web-servers/ email servers, where a decent upload speed is required (or) in companies where the video output of the IP Surveillance Cameras needs to be viewed at HO and hence a higher upload speed is required at the branch office. Normal broadband plans by default offer higher download speeds with very less upload speeds.

Some broadband service providers even offer VPN over Broadband plans for private networks to carry all the Inter-branch office communications data securely (using encryption and tunneling) without end-users having to implement expensive VPN equipment to create VPN networks over public broadband.

Fast Wireless technologies like 5G are also a good option for last-mile business broadband connectivity in the future.

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