A startup without a reliable internet connection today is going to struggle to compete in today’s global economy. Potential new customers expect to be able to browse a company’s website and contact them via phone, email, or webchat, and if your company is not always online you are losing sales. It doesn’t matter how great a product or service you are selling, if your sales team are not available to close the deals, your company is going to struggle.
To make sure you are reliably online and available, it is worth exploring business broadband or fibre packages, which some significant extra features, unavailable to home users, that are designed specifically for businesses, such as:
Greater speeds
Whilst most families will struggle to max out a 50MBps connection at home, no matter how many games or Netflix movies they are streaming, but businesses may need significantly greater speeds. Business fibre connections can go beyond 1GBps, which could come in very useful if you are dealing with large files like videos or have a dozen or more employees at the same location. Moreover, the speeds are more reliable, as business connections are generally prioritised over home connections by ISPs.
Service Level Agreements (SLA)
Businesses rely on their fibre or broadband connections to keep their business running, and so ISPs offer business customers guarantees that their connection will always meet a certain level of service, including uptime, speeds, and more. It is vital for startups to be able to rely on their connectivity, and a business connection SLA will guarantee that.
Phone services
Many ISPs bundle home phone services with broadband packages, but the business phone packages are different beasts with cloud-based complex phone systems, multiple digital phone lines, non-geographic business numbers, and VoIP services. A hosted or cloud-based phone system can be a boon to startups, as they will allow a small company to add the telephony infrastructure it needs without the huge upfront costs of implementing a physical phone system, and will also generally result in lower call costs thanks to the calls being made over the internet rather than through traditional phone lines.
Some great deals are available at https://www.talktalkbusiness.co.uk/products/voice/business-phone-systems/
Static IP
If you need for people working remotely to login to your office network, then you will need one or more static IP addresses, which tend to only be offered to business customers. Cloud-based services are making static IPs less of a requirement today than just a few years ago, but for many digital focused businesses they remain a must-have.
This article was written in collaboration with TalkTalk
Photograph by LoveToTakePhotos