Experience with serviced office internet?

AndrewMurray

Free Member
Sep 23, 2009
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I am currently looking for a serviced office for our business - we are currently all home-workers that rely on remote access to some servers in my home. The benefit of the office will partly be to relocate these servers into a serviced office with improved internet (bandwidth) and physical access (or at least is the theory). Current access is provided by ADSL consistently achieving ~4.5mbps down, ~0.75 up. I assumed that internet provided by a serviced office would be better however this doesn't always appear to be the case. On the surface it seems that serviced office internet access is generally more expensive and slower when compared with residential fibre/ADSL (I do understand that improved SLA, support, etc are a factor in the price difference).

Most serviced offices offer contended and uncontended (leased) options. I've seen opinions in marketing material such as this "speed of 0.5 MBps dedicated bandwidth would be the equivalent of at least 20 Mbp" - however given that BT provides contention on a national level with most users achieving the rated bandwidth these sort of claims seem unconvincing - and thus contended access may be good enough. Is "contended access" in a service office environment much worse that that provided by national providers of residential broadband? I.e. 10Mbps contended in a service office may only provide consistently at least 4mbps where a 10mbps residential line will likely achieve around that figure? Am I comparing apples against pears?

I'm generally interested in hearing of any experience in this area or gotchas - I don't want to be stuck in an office where the network access is not good enough or prohibitively expensive.
 

Alan

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  • Aug 16, 2011
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    Couple of things

    1. is there a reason that you don't relocate what runs on your home servers to a proper datacentre, as most of your issue is probably 0.75 up, where as if you are on a cheap VPS in a datacentre you'll be at 100Mbps+ so your other home users will get their full download speeds on their ADSLs respectively

    2. Regarding serviced offices, they will all differ, at our office with get 70mb down and 2mb up, but I still wouldn't run a server on 2mb up.
     
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    AndrewMurray

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    Sep 23, 2009
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    Our business makes software run on embedded devices (i.e. customer provided proprietary hardware - imagine something like a Rasberry Pi) - we put these devices in a 'board farm' where our employees can remotely access and interact with - this has worked very well for us and we'd like to continue with the farm (that I referred to as our 'servers'). Thus we can't relocate this into a datacentre and we occasionally need physical access to it to replace the hardware etc for new customers. We don't require a huge amount of bandwidth but once in a while we occasionally end up transferring large files (most traffic is to the farm).

    70mb down/2mb up - is that a contended service? Do you consistently achieve those rates?
     
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    Alan

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  • Aug 16, 2011
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    Yes consistently. I guess it is contended, but then it is designed for desktop. As I said there will be different services for different offices. If you get a office in a town with good 4G you can always get a 4G sim Router as a way of getting speed (and backup)
     
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    Raw Rob

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    Aug 1, 2009
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    Thus we can't relocate this into a datacentre and we occasionally need physical access to it to replace the hardware etc for new customers.
    Maybe you can. Data centres that allow "co-location" allow you to put your own hardware into their data centre. Clearly you will have less access than at home, but if you can find a data centre close by then it could work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre

    A quick search on Google shows that some data centres even offer 24 hour physical access to your hardware, eg https://www.serverspace.co.uk/colocation/server-colocation/
     
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    Alan

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  • Aug 16, 2011
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    Good point. When we moved in within the first week the company that provides the broadband and infrastructure in the same building asked if we wanted to move our servers into their data centre in the building(I didn't as I'm happy where they are and don't need physical access )
     
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    Some datacentres have offices across the street if not part of the building. If your cohosting could be useful. Or google for serviced offices with fibre. It really depends on your location but I know some storage units have offices with pretty good internet.
     
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