If you have ever wondered why the prices of residential Internet services can vary so much, when in many cases the advertised “speed” does not change, this article is for you.
An Internet access service is a combination of many different elements that together produce the service that customers experience.
Your provider has to arrange for services from underlying carriers to create the connection between your site location to the carrier’s network, and then through to your provider’s network, and then through to the Internet itself. Along the way, many different factors determine the quality, reliability and actual performance of the overall service, and the essential “speed” of the connection between your site location and the carrier’s network is just one of those factors.
Unfortunately, the complexity of the situation is hard to explain to customers in the form of marketing or product information, and so there can be an assumption made that if the advertised speed is the same then the cheapest service is a good choice because for a lower cost the customer can access the “same” quality and speed of service. But this is rarely the case!
For a provider to offer the lowest possible price in a competitive market, corners need to be cut. Sometimes, this can be in areas where customers notice quickly, such as in poor customer service (because the customer service area is understaffed or working with poor systems and tools). Sometimes it can be in areas that have no effect on the customer, such as where the provider chooses to be efficient or very focussed in their operations without affecting service quality. Most of the time however, one of the corners that is cut is in the nature of the Internet service itself.
A provider can reduce their costs relating to the actual Internet connection in many, many ways. For example they could:
- Reduce the cost (and probably also the performance and reliability) of the equipment they use.
- Reduce the allocation of bandwidth to each customer, which means that they need all customers to use the servics less or it will affect other customers. This is known as oversubscribing, and doing it too much will result in congestion.
- Reduce the quality of speed of their Internet transit connections, which means that customers need to share a smaller sized shared connection to the wider Internet.
By using any of the above approaches a provider can offer lower prices, but customers will be affected by the corners that are being cut. If you have ever noticed your Internet connection being slow at different times of the day or on the weekend, it is likely that you are experiencing congestion of your connection.
There are no short cuts to avoid these problems – the only way to offer a higher quality of service, and specifically to offer true business grade services, is to ensure that every aspect of the service is suitable for that objective.
Activa Communications only provides services to business customers, and all of our services are designed to provide uncongested, uncontents services suitable for use by businesses to support business productivity. There are many types of services with different level of reliability and performance and, of course, price, and so our approach is to ensure that our customers are given a range of options and a clear understanding of the benefits and costs of each so that they can make choices that truly suit their needs.