Most businesses would struggle to function without the internet, and the internet relies on a broadband connection. Yet as the demands placed on broadband networks increase, the ADSL and FTTC lines still used by many businesses are struggling to keep up, severely reducing productivity.
As the data demands of everyday tasks, communication tools and general browsing continue to rise, old internet connections are becoming more and more outmoded. A dedicated fibre broadband connection could solve these issues in one fell swoop, and give you the capacity to adopt new software and services.
What are ADSL and FTTC?
Most homes and businesses in the UK still rely on copper cables to transmit at least part of their internet connection. Traditionally, all internet connections were carried over existing copper telephone cables, from a local exchange to your local cabinet, and then to your door. Old dial-up (DSL) connections used your entire line to connect to the internet, literally phoning up your internet service provider (ISP) to establish a connection.
This was superseded by Asymmetric Digital Subscribers Line (ADSL), which effectively split your copper cable in half: half of its bandwidth was used for phone signals, and the other half for broadband. This allowed for the two to be used in tandem, but because of the limitations of copper for passing signals, most of the bandwidth was dedicated to downloads rather than uploads. Download speeds were limited to 24 Mbps, with uploads being much lower than this.
A more recent development is fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC). This method employs high speed and high bandwidth fibre-optic cables between the local exchange and your cabinet, then copper cables from the cabinet to your house. This improves both reliability and speeds, with downloads up to 80 Mbps, though this still depends on your distance from the exchange, and the age and quality of the copper cables into your premises.
The problem with FTTC
Fibre-to-the-cabinet has been a positive step for the UK’s ageing and neglected broadband infrastructure, and has improved speeds and reliability for many people. However, it has failed to keep pace with the development of internet services, and changes in people’s habits. While tripling maximum download speeds compared to ADSL seems like a quantum leap, it was well overdue, and the demand for data continues to increase exponentially.
The rising popularity of streaming services, increasing size of web assets, and advent of 4K video have massively increased the average level of data consumption. This has been further exacerbated by the recent increase in remote working, leading to people spending more time online, sharing more files between homes and offices, and spending more time in video and voice calls. All of this places further strain on the infrastructure, and requires bandwidth and speeds beyond what FTTC can manage.
The potential solution to this is the rollout of full fibre, commonly known as fibre-to-the-door (FTTD). By replacing copper cables with fibre-optic cables and switching old phone lines to modern VoIP lines, individuals and businesses can benefit from huge increases in bandwidth and speeds. The current highest speed available in a commercial fibre-optic network service is 10Gbps (10,000 Mbps), but isolated tests have successfully reached speeds of 1Pbps (100 million Mb). In short, the potential for fibre is limited as much by what ISPs can handle — and what people actually need — as it is by the technology itself.
Benefits of fibre broadband for businesses
Full fibre broadband has some obvious advantages over older technologies, but it isn’t necessarily obvious how they apply in a business setting — or how they compare to the cost of installing a fibre line. Here then are some of the biggest benefits of fibre broadband for businesses, and why you should consider investing in a fibre internet solution:
File sharing
Files are getting larger, and the kinds of files businesses use are changing too. As well as traditional files such as spreadsheets and documents, photos and videos are increasingly sent by email, social apps, or over cloud storage services such as Drive and Dropbox.
All of these assets for websites, plans, promotional materials and more put an increasing strain on copper broadband connections, particularly when multiple people are downloading things at the same time. This is not to mention other services that might be passively using data, such as having internet radio on, or listening to Spotify as you work.
Marketing and media
Even businesses who would not normally engage with digital media are seeing this change due to the prevalence of social media. Many companies now produce their own social media and promotional content such as videos, editing and publishing content. This may mean not only uploading content, but downloading media as part of the editing process, and sharing those source files with others.
With even short videos often running into multiple gigabytes, uploading videos to social media networks and video platforms can take hours on a traditional line — and this is on top of the time they take to render. All of this eats into your productivity, and prevents you from being reactive with your content, in a medium which demands reactivity.
Flexible working
Following the rise of remote working during the pandemic, many businesses have adopted it permanently, either as a situational practice or with permanent work from home days. For anyone who doesn’t work on a laptop, this means embracing cloud storage solutions in order to access files. For anything that can’t be accessed directly through cloud software, this necessarily means uploading things to access in one location, and downloading them in another.
Zoom calls are also a common fixture of post-pandemic business, both for remote working and client communication. Having numerous people on a call can consume a lot of bandwidth, particularly with high quality video, and can lead to issues with lag and disconnections. High quality VoIP for things like customer service is also increasingly popular as a replacement for traditional fixed ISDN lines, and adds further burden to your Internet infrastructure.
Browsing speeds
As with all technology, what was sufficient 10 or 20 years ago often isn’t enough today. Where the internet is concerned, this means bigger and more resource intensive websites. While developers will try to optimise their sites to run at lower speeds, large images and videos are increasingly used as decoration, with autoplaying video banners and huge header images designed for 4K screens. All of this means larger image and video files, which take longer to load — demanding more bandwidth as well as better computers.
Fibre broadband provides both ample bandwidth and lightning fast download speeds. This not only allows you to load pages more quickly, but allows multiple people to load large sites or other resources at the same time. This is invaluable not only for general browsing, but also for things like video training courses, brochures or other resources that employees might commonly have to access — saving time and making you more responsive to digital communications.
Final thoughts
Fibre broadband isn’t necessary for every business, but it is increasingly invaluable. As your business grows and as data-heavy communication, file sharing and other services become more common, the strain on old broadband networks will increase — potentially leaving you at a competitive disadvantage.
Sota is one of the UK’s leading independent IT companies, providing professional IT support in Kent, cloud computing, cyber resilience, connectivity, and unified communications. Having worked with countless businesses over the years, they are experts in their field, ready to advise and offer tailored solutions for each and every company.
