Matthew Buck’s Blog – Principal Engineer at RatwareUK

Location, location, location.

I thought about writing this post after a friend of mine called me and said he’d found a new office for his business – but he’d heard reports that the broadband on-site was limited. He asked for my advice.

There are three key things you should remember when sourcing broadband for your business:

1) Is VirginMedia’s Fibre Optic (not ADSL – they offer this to non-fibre enabled areas) available in your location?
If so, purchase this and read no further. VirginMedia’s fibre service is unrivalled, both in their routing hardware and down to the wire. If you can’t go with VirginMedia’s fibre optic service you are stuck with ADSL. This isn’t too bad as long as you’re close to the exchange and your exchange has a wide range of operator presence.

2) What services are available in the exchange to which your potential phone line would be connected?
Some people sign up with [Random ISP] Ltd and then experience a poor level of internet service. This is usually because although [Random ISP] Ltd sell broadband to customers all over the UK – they don’t actually have their own hardware present in your local exchange to which your physical line is connected. This means that all communication between the wider internet and your router has to travel through BT’s core hardware first before being re-routed to another BT exchange to hop onto [Random ISP]‘s network. Clearly this is undesirable and users tend to experience lag, packet jitter and, during peak times, bandwidth throttling.

You can check exactly which operators are present in your local exchange by visiting Sam Knows . First make sure you get the correct exchange by entering your phone number and postcode (your line may be connected to any close by). My advice is that if the operator you want has no presence in your exchange, cut your losses and sign up with BT Broadband to receive the best service available.

3) Once you’ve found out which exchange you’re connected to, also check the distance you are away from it.
Many operators will sell you ‘ADSL2+ up to 24Mbps broadband’ – however if your premises is 8km away from the exchange you are likely to get a sketchy 2Mbps which drops on and of throughout the day. Not great if you use hosted services! Use Sam Knows Exchange Mapping to show/hide the coverage of your local exchange. If you are right on the edge of the exchange’s coverage, it’s likely you’ll need some expert help, such as a bonded broadband solution, leased line or in rare cases; satellite broadband. There are other factors to do with your physical line which will affect speed, but none really more so than your distance away from the exchange.

In answering my friend’s question, he didn’t move his business. It turns out that many existing tenants only received slow broadband and the premises was situated on the very edge of the local exchange’s coverage.

In summary:

• Can I avoid ADSL? If so, go with VirginMedia’s Fibe Optic Broadband.
• Does the operator I’m signing with have a presence in the exchange? If not, just go with BT as you’ll be using their network on your first hops anyway.
• Are you close enough to your exchange to receive a good level of service? Remember, operators will sell you 24Mbps and you may only ever be able to receive 6Mbps. So maybe find a cheaper deal, if available.

Yesterday I got thinking about some of our clients and the way they do business and I thought ‘Why is a strong relationship with an IT support provider essential?’

IT has become an essential part if not a mandatory cog in most enterprises. Just as you have someone looking after the direction of the company, the finance, the vision – you’re also going to need a good IT support partner. For the past decade at least, IT has been tied in with marketing, communication, data, disaster recovery, corporate security, efficiency and business growth. Here are a few real life examples that I can think of immediately which demonstrate why a strong relationship with an IT support provider is essential -

1) An important email sent by one of our clients to their customer is repeatedly bouncing back.

Your IT support partners are able to see the error message and commence diagnostics to resolve the issue. It’s important to remember email can not work correctly for many reasons. Some are within your IT Support‘s control, others are factors outside your organisation:

The domain name or email address has been entered incorrectly.

The email address exists, however, the recipient’s mail server is offline.

The email address exists, however, the recipient has mis-configured their name servers or DNS records.

If you are relaying straight out from your mail server, there could be a problem with your ISP’s DNS servers which means your mail server is unable to resolve the IP of the recipient mail server.

The email is being rejected by the recipient’s mail server due to the recipient’s inbound mail policy.

Your mailbox is over-limit and your mailserver is not allowing you to send/receive email.

The recipient’s mailbox is over-limit and is not accepting new mail.

…

The above initially reported problem appears to be minor, however, many problems could arise from this one incident; some not very technical, some which are. If you’ve got an IT support contract, you’ll have a team to hand which will solve an issue like this quickly.

2) You switch your workstation on in the morning and it won’t boot up. You have work to do and there are no spare computer terminals today.

If you have an IT support contract, you can immediately hand the issue over to them. Quite often, if a computer is unusable, your IT Support partners will lend your company a replacement PC immediately whilst your existing workstation is repaired. If the workstation has been procured from your IT Support partner, it’s likely to be under warranty and your IT Support will have strong support links with the vendor, so you’ll be sure that the problem will be resolved quickly and effectively.

3) You wish to terminate one of your employee’s contracts, however, you’re worried about corporate sabotage and access to the employee’s emails.

Your IT Support partner will be able to best advise you on this. It’s likely that your IT system is already configured with several layers of access. For example, an employee with a sales role will not be able to see data from the accounts department. In the event that the employee’s contract is terminated abruptly, your IT support provider can assist throughout the process, making sure data remains safe and recoverable.

RatwareUK once had a case where on the last day of employment a user maliciously deleted  all project files. The data was immediately recovered by RatwareUK, allowing the company and the user’s successor to continue with the project. Your IT support provider will also be able to divert employee emails to another user and provide access to or merge their mailbox into another account. Lastly, if mobile devices are in use, it’s likely that your IT Support will be able to wipe or ‘kill’ the handheld remotely, meaning that even if an employee leaves the organisation quickly they won’t have access to or a record of contacts or corporate email.

4) Your landlord has sent you a letter giving you 3 months’ notice to leave your current business premises. He wants to sell the property and land for commercial gain.

In the event you are faced with the above, you’ll probably be looking for a new home for your business the same week. You may find the right place, but soon you’ll be faced with questions like these:

Does it have suitable structured cabling for my network?

Where can I place my existing server and network equipment?

How do I plan the move so that you don’t have any email or business downtime?

Your IT support provider will be able to answer all these questions and assist your business in the most important decision making you’ve probably had to make all year. Office relocations can be stressful and there’s a lot to go wrong, plus you’ve got to have all your services enabled before you move – telecoms, broadband and fax, for example. If you’ve got branch offices, you may have to reconfigure VPNs and firewalls so that your wide area network encompasses the new office.

If you’ve got a strong relationship with an IT support provider, you can trust their expertise and allow them to assist in maintaining, developing and expanding your business. If you’re looking for a new IT support provider, take a moment to contact RatwareUK for a no-obligation IT support contract assessment.