Is cheap broadband a false economy for your business?
Whether you are a small business or a larger company, many business owners choose broadband purely based on price. Normally this is a good thing as it saves on costs, but is it a false economy? What happens when you have a problem?
Broadband is cheap, often costing £1 or less per day, and in normal situations that is absolutely fine. However, its when things go wrong that you need to consider your options. Contrary to popular belief, standard broadband delivered through a copper telephone line can, and does, go wrong from time to time. Being based on a copper telephone line means that any issue with that underlying copper line, will result in a poor or unusable broadband connection. Many people do not realise that standard broadband comes with NO GUARANTEES whatsoever, so Openreach who maintain the UK copper telephone network are under no obligation to fix any problems within a specified amount of time.
Could you afford to be without your internet connection for a day, or longer?
Lets do the maths:
Say you are a business turning over £200,000 per year. Minus weekends and bank holidays there’s 253 working days per year, so that’s an average turnover of £790.52 per day.
You decide to connect your business using a broadband connection for £30 per month, because the dedicated leased line option at £300 per month seems too expensive. The broadband line is less of an overhead on your business, but it comes with no guarantee of service, or service level agreement if it goes faulty.
So if your broadband was down for a day, and you rely on an internet connection to make your sales, then your business could potentially lose £790.52 each and every day.
Your £30 broadband with no guarantees of uptime or service level agreement, seems like a false economy, as you may have saved some money on your internet connection with your overheads, but potentially losing £790.52 or more from your sales figures when it goes down,
Now, lets consider a dedicated leased line connection. This is a fibre optic cable delivered directly into your premises, but as its not based on a copper line, its much more reliable, as well as capable of delivering faster speeds. A dedicated leased line comes with a 99.9% uptime and 4-hour service level agreement, meaning that faults are fixed the same day. The longest you are likely to be offline for any reason is therefore 4 hours, meaning the maximum loss to your business is £395.26 (based on an 8-hour day). A typical monthly cost of a leased line is around £300 per month, making it ten times more expensive than broadband, but the potential losses are massively reduced.
Is it worth the risk?
Based on our estimates above, the potential risk to your business using broadband would be £790.52 for every day of downtime, but on a leased line it would be £395.26 as a maximum, as there is a guaranteed fix time. When you look at it in terms of potential lost revenue, then it seems pretty straightforward that a leased line is actually the better choice.
Want to know more?
If you want to know more information on how a leased line can be better for your business, then contact us or call 0161 711 1100