Business Broadband

kilburn

Hi folks, I am doing a marketing project at present based on the potential for fibre broadband nationwide for the SME sector and the intentions of the sector moving in to cloud computing. This survey is not being conducted by any company it is just a project but would be relevant to all business in Ireland.

The mods have been good enough to let me post it so please please please do not get into arguing, bashing or insulting current providers and please just reply to the thread for its purpose.

There are 4 questions that I have

1. Is your current broadband connection adequate for your business needs?

2. Do you have short to medium term plans that would make your connection inadequate?

3. How soon would you consider moving your ICT infastructure into cloud computing?

4. Considering the IT savings that are estimated at 40-50%, what price would you put on a connection that would enable a high quality secure dedicated carrier grade fiber to your business?

kilburn

Anyeone willing to share their thoughts?

srsly78

My registered office is in rural co.meath (tara area). Can only get 1MBit dsl from eircom or vodafone (they bought perlico). People up the road can get 20Mbit for some reason but we are fooked. Even the 1mbit was dodgy in the past, was more like 56kbit/s. After much moaning they did fix it eventually but still limited to 1Mbit.

Result = I can't operate from my regd office, I work from Dublin instead (UPC cable = win).

Regarding the "cloud": This is a load of marketing ****e. We have all been using the cloud for years anyway (gmail etc). I use truecrypt+dropbox to back stuff up in the "cloud".

nipper banks

1. No.
2. Yes, would like to do some "cloud" (but not all our IT) and some ICT.
3. see above. Woud move some now.
4. Price is difficult, but not thousands.

kilburn

Thanks guys anyone else got any thoughts? this will be closing in a few days so would appreciate some feedback

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

So cloud and IP phones etc are a reality of new business and there is a huge need for lots of capacity. As many have said UPC in certain area's of the capital can do 100MB connection which is more than enough for most businesses.

In my case we have a sexy fiber optics cable about 30m away from our headquarters which the lovely EU paid for, but the Irish guys didn't finish the last part which was connecting it into the business parks around. Costs to connect the line, excluding planning permission to dig up a public road and those associated costs is about 20k and then 10k onward per annum.

The price issue is a very difficult one, in about 2 years it will be insanely cheaper to get faster connections. The advances in the area mean that an installation at this time can be wasted money. Advances in UMTS means mobile devices could get 16mbs and cloud isn't always as bandwidth intensive as many make out as the processing is done in cloud and just the results are streamed back.

To me a preforming (and not "upto") 100mb connection would be worth 200-350 per month but that's probably the ceiling I'd guess.

mneylon

We are on the Carlow MAN with backhaul onto our main network in Dublin

So our Carlow offices are basically an extension of our main network and have full native IPv6 / IPv4 dualstack and 100 meg - which we can increase if we really need to

kilburn

Thanks for that guys any more thoughts