Leased Lines for crazy-cheap

[djwellis]

Morning all,


I'm in the midst of designing an infrastructure at the moment for delivery of high-speed internet (leased-line grade).

Initial tests have all done well and we are rolling it out to my happy little town of Stafford within the next 12 months.

The system will deliver connection speeds of between 1Mb and 50Mb (upload and download)


I'm posting here because I need to get some feedback and because setting it up in an area would not be economical unless there were quite a few initial people signing up.

Costings are approximately £25/Mb - so for example, a 10MB leased line equivalent would cost £250/Month


My question is - what sort of things would you look for in a provider of lines of this speed - would it be speed, ping-time, reliability, cost, etc?


Sorry to be a little bit ambiguous at this point, but still ironing out a lot of the details,


Many thanks,

[Fuel]

My key factor of success would be reliability. But that may well be due to my current objective:

I want to get rid of my current "box-on-the-wall" telephone system and move to an IP based solution.

Most people in the IT-telephony market somehow (to me at least) seem to imply, that the reliability of the internet availability is the Achilles heel here.

Thus: a reasonably good upload speed and max reliability.

Cheers,

Chris

[mcardall]

Hi,

I'm a Director of an IT Systems Integrator and we occasionally re-sell internet connectivity.

It's a really hard market to differentiate yourself in and I believe you will struggle to generate good sales/margins if you are going to sell your service based on the perimeters mentioned (cost, ping-time, uptime etc)

Although you may create the fastest, most reliable service around, it will be hard for you to market that when there's so many other people saying the same thing. Also, the technology is moving so fast that the cost to remain on top will eat into your profits very quickly.

If you look at most ISP's these days, they supplement their connectivity business with other services, with Managed Services being the most popular (Hosted VoIP, Managed Security, Web filtering etc).

I think you need to work out what challenges you will be helping your potential customers to overcome and start from there.

I didn't see you mention customer service as something people look for - I assume you know that this will be vitally important but you'd be surprised at how much business is lost by ISPs who cannot get the basics right.

You may also want to look at the VoIP angle - a lot of smaller businesses are put off using the internet to transport voice traffic (and rightly so) because ADSL and similar technologies cannot generally guarantee call quality and the necessary uptime. However the technology has changed lately so perhaps look at marketing yourself as a provider of internet based services that can allow companies to safely rely on VoIP and therefore receive all the benefits that can bring with it.

Hope this helps
Mike

Ocera Ltd
The Warehouse, 1 Draper Street, Southborough, Kent.

[andy@telecomhelpcouk]

The two products that spring to mind are;

1. aDSL2+ with Annexe M. A little known product that allows you to adjust upload/download DSL speeds. aDSL2+ gives you 24mb/2.5mb for about £50 a month, but you could Annexe M it to about 10mb/10mb I seem to remember. SLA's won't be great as it's best effort.

2. Buy an MPLS tail from Griffin or other. Comes with QOS so best performer although unsure of latest prices.

Hope this helps Andy

[djwellis]

Thanks for your responses - we have been working on the infrastructure in the meantime and to be fair - aren't really expecting to "hit the mainstream"

Thank you for your information - we will continue work on it over the year and hopefully, we will fill a little niche here - but I am encouraged by this feedback!

thank you

[djwellis]

Well... It's been nearly two years now and the infrastructure is actually up and running.

We ultimately connected to a 100Mbps fibre connection in Essington and used a microwave link to get that to Stafford where it's being used to deliver connectivity to some of our customers - again, through point-to-point microwave connections.

My thanks to those that PM'd me with words of wisdom!

[british steve]

Well... It's been nearly two years now and the infrastructure is actually up and running.

We ultimately connected to a 100Mbps fibre connection in Essington and used a microwave link to get that to Stafford where it's being used to deliver connectivity to some of our customers - again, through point-to-point microwave connections.

My thanks to those that PM'd me with words of wisdom!

Did you manage to stick to your price points?

[djwellis]

Did you manage to stick to your price points?

The higher speeds, yes.
However, the lower speeds are a more expensive than originally quoted