But I Have Fibre Internet at Home… What’s The Difference?
Fibre this… fibre that… you may have noticed companies popping up with their own branded versions of fibre. Many of these advertised networks are really Fibre-to-the-node (FTTN), meaning only part of the connection line is fibre. The rest is usually made of copper or another kind of wire. Although these networks work for residential neighbourhoods, there are several key benefits of true fibre for business.
- No network sharing. Residential networks share fibre bandwidth with multiple households in a given neighbourhood. Fibre internet for business, however, is never shared so you can rest easy knowing that your employees will have access to a guaranteed 100/100 Mbps connection speed even during peak times.
- Reliability. Residential neighbourhoods don’t have a service-level agreement (SLA) so outages can occur frequently. Losing Netflix at home is one thing, but most businesses can’t afford an outage, if even for a few hours. True fibre internet comes with an SLA to ensure you benefit from high uptime.
- Unlimited download capacity. Residential home service often has strict download limits, so data use is limited. Activities like video streaming and photo uploads can quickly consume what’s available on these circuits.
We don’t believe in data caps, so with iTel’s fibre internet for business your company gets unlimited download capacity. As companies increasingly use cloud services in everyday tasks, data usage can quickly reach its max. With the unlimited capacity of fibre, your employees can stream those YouTube playlists all day long.
Why is Business Fibre so Much Better?
Fibre internet comes from a tiny glass tube no thicker than a strand of hair. These tubes contain wavelengths of light that carry your data (everything from your file transfers to that cat GIF you emailed company-wide) from Point A to Point B. Light travels much faster than your typical electromagnetic waves and can travel further distances without suffering attenuation. With iTel Fibre, you can download 400x more Mbps than a regular ADSL, so you can benefit from less wait time and more productivity.
Symmetrical Connections
Not only does fibre offer faster speeds than traditional connections, but with more data throughput it allows for larger bandwidth profiles and in most cases are symmetrical meaning 100/100 Mbps. Although a symmetrical connection may not have been important 10 years ago, the rise of cloud services like Dropbox and Office 365 has made it essential for businesses to have equal download and upload speeds. Ever wonder why you can quickly download large media from Dropbox, but when you upload your own it feels like a lifetime? An unbalanced (asymmetrical) connection may be the cause – but with fibre internet’s symmetrical bandwidth capabilities, you’ll never worry about unequal download/upload speeds again.
Scalability
With the ability to scale bandwidth, fibre internet can grow with your business. When it’s time to upgrade your connection, copper networks may require additional installation, but a fibre profile can be increased without a technician visiting. As such, fibre internet provides more flexibility for growing businesses – whether you’re small or large, fibre meets the needs you have today, not just what you needed when you first signed up!
A Quick Data Recap
The building blocks of data is binary code, aka, a series of 1’s and 0’s. These 1’s and 0’s are called bits, and 8 bits make up a byte. Bits are denoted by a lowercase “b” (Mb) and Bytes are denoted by an uppercase “B” (MB).
Have you ever noticed when you go to purchase a USB stick or other storage device it always says Bytes? This is because Bytes are always used to measure storage. When we talk about the size of a connection, however, it’s always in bits. (e.g. you may purchase a 15 Mbit internet connection for home, but a 100 Mbit connection for your business).
What is Attenuation?
The loss of signal strength over long-distance transmissions. The more attenuation a signal has, the more unintelligible it becomes. To combat this, networks send multiple repeat signals.
Bottom Line
Speed, reliability, symmetrical connections, and scalable bandwidth are benefits of fibre that businesses are tapping into every day. With something as small as a strand of hair, you are joining the next level of internet service to ensure your business stays in the productivity fast lane.
Still a little hesitant about fibre? Give us a call and we’ll help find what works best for your business.
