Leased Lines for crazy-cheap

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

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.

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 said:

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!

Click to expand...

Did you manage to stick to your price points?