Is broadband 'business grade'?

There are still sceptical views around broadband connectivity and whether it is of sufficient quality or robustness for business. We see the issues falling into three broad areas:

1. Perception
• Business grade DSL is different from consumer DSL. Tiscali provide private access to an Enterprise LAN through an IPVPN and not via the Internet.
• We offer flexible contention ratios to meet a variety of business needs (50:1 / 20:1 / 10:1 / 5:1 / 2.5:1 / 1:1) with prioritised traffic within the network.
• Our core network is MPLS based – providing high levels of call control, robustness and security.
• The service is wrapped with high levels of customer service.
2. Service Level Guarantees
• Tiscali to offer Service Level Guarantees for our IPVPN services, something that is not offered on the majority of VoIP solutions.
• Low fault rates and large network ownership and visibility has led Tiscali being able to offer these guarantees.
• BT Wholesale are seeing between 97 to 98% uptime reliability on all DSL lines - According to BT analysis, DSL faults fall largely down to PC or CPE faults (55%), Service Provider Network (20%) or the last mile and exchange (20%).
3. End to end Quality of Service (QoS)

Strong demand for traffic prioritisation has lead to Tiscali extending MPLS guarantees for high priority traffic - QoDSL. Our ability to offer low latency queuing and guaranteed low round trip delay enables us to offer Service Level Guarantees (SLGs) for delay sensitive traffic such as VoIP, video, streaming, online training.