Questions to ask your new business broadband provider

Choosing a new broadband provider for your business should not be difficult. You want fast broadband, that is stable and allows teams to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. A recent Which UK survey found that 70% of users had experienced problems with their broadband supplier in the last 12 months. A huge increase caused by more users relying on cloud-based software, a lack of customer support following recent lockdowns and lack of infrastructure following years of under-investment by companies chasing connections to keep shareholders happy at the cost of their customers.

So what questions should you ask your new business broadband provider before signing the contract, and what do these terms mean? Let Baltic Broadband be your fully independent guide to choosing the best business broadband provider for your company.

SKIP TO THE END IF YOU WANT THE TL;DR VERSION!

1. What happens when my service is affected?

This may seem like a very obvious question, but it is important to drill down into how your business broadband provider deals with your problems. What ticketing system do they use? What process is in place for escalating complaints? Where is the customer support and technical support team based? What level of service is considered ‘poor’ or ‘insufficient’ before your Service Level Agreement (SLA) is actioned?

The chances are that your first contact will either be with an offshore call centre or via an AI supported virtual support desk. The team will not be familiar with your location, you will likely be nothing more than a customer number and job reference number. Your SLA will only be actionable following multiple problems within a set time scale (often three months) meaning for a considerable amount of time your team may suffer from poor connectivity and be left unable to complete uploading and downloading documents, affecting relationships with customers and causing backlogs internally. Really drill down into what happens when your service is affected and make the decision based on the best customer service and reimbursement. Your broadband should work, it’s only when it doesn’t that you see the real cost of not asking these questions and knowing the answers in advance. 

Most Alternative Networks (Alt-Nets) will offer much better customer service with local support and have real relationships with their customers. It is well worth searching out for local suppliers who can fix problems quickly and become a real partner to your company, as if things go wrong, you want problems fixed, not passed from department to department in various regions and countries.

2. What is the contention rate on my business broadband service?

Your first question may be ‘what is a contention rate’? It basically means how many companies/ other users are sharing the broadband line being supplied to your business. And why is this important? Well, think of broadband and the internet as a road. Everything moves quicker when there are fewer vehicles on the road. Huge amounts of vehicles results in traffic, slower movement and sometimes completely blocks a road. Imagine you are paying for a quiet road that gets your vehicle wherever you want it. A single lane. And then that lane is filled with vehicles from all of your neighbouring companies. It makes your connection slower. It’s really important you have access to the road you pay for, rather than your business broadband provider selling your road to everyone else by you. Look for a business broadband provider that caps contention rates, or has a low number of users. The maximum you want is a ratio of 10 users to one line. Otherwise your business will be impacted by multiple other users sending and downloading huge files that affects your service and productivity. And your SLA is unlikely to cover ‘slow’ traffic caused by multiple users. Most Alt-Nets will cap their contention rates in order to provide better broadband speeds to customers. As they are not tied to shareholders, they will generally provide a better service to customers rather than trying to impress shareholders with selling the same space as many times as possible and are well worth checking out.

3. How long is my contract and what happens at the end?

This seems obvious but there is a reason to ask this question. Many, many providers ‘roll-over’ customers into their next contract without the customer even realising it has happened. Hidden in the small print is often text that highlights that without a clear cancellation three months before the end of the term, they can roll your contract over for another 36 month period. It happens all the time. You can eventually get out of this contract but then there will be an exit fee applicable, which often amounts to a significant sum. Many Alt-Nets will offer monthly rolling contracts or 12 month contracts with no exit fees. It is well worth doing your homework to make sure you are not tied into expensive contracts for longer than necessary when other options are available in the market.

TL;DR Version

What happens when there is a problem with the service?

Most providers have a ticketing system that will involve their contracted suppliers and third-party engineers diagnosing and working on the problems with your service. Companies like Baltic Broadband (and other Alternative Network Providers) supply a service where you speak to the team that installed your service and know exactly where to look to solve problems quickly.

What is the contention rate of the service you are supplying to my business?

Unless you are installing a costly fixed line solely for your business with a long lead-time for installation, you will be sharing bandwidth with many, many other companies. This will slow down your service. Companies like Baltic Broadband cap the contention rates to ensure you always have a fast service.

How long is the contract and what happens at the end?

Most providers will put you into a long contract, typically 36 months, with a hidden ‘roll-over’ written into the contract to tie you in for even longer or face an expensive exit fee. Companies like Baltic Broadband offer monthly rolling contracts or 12 month contracts with no exit fee.

Want to know more? Contact info@balticbroadband.com and see if we can help you have a better business broadband experience.

When launching a new radio station targeting the 45+ age demographic, a new player in the sector turned to Baltic Broadband to help with the launch. 

It soon became clear that the radio station needed two separate connections in order to achieve their goals.

The first required an in-depth technical set-up broadcast connection to be strategically prioritised in order for the audio signal to remain consistent. In order to achieve this, the team used PEERING, so the route between the server and the broadcast equipment was as short as possible. This wasn’t just providing a broadband solution, it was provisioning an engineering solution to ensure the radio station could reach as many DAB, Online, and SMART device listeners (such as Google Home and Amazon Echo) as possible.

The second connection was to help every member of the team ensure they could do their jobs without worrying about the broadband. The ability to have sales teams using their cloud-based software programs, internal recording studios able to upload large files like adverts and news items seamlessly to their broadcast colleagues whilst enabling the team and visitors to access wi-fi in every corner of the office helped with collaboration, efficiency, and productivity.

The radio station is now well-established in Merseyside, with happy listeners and advertisers, and it’s just another example of how getting the right broadband partner at the start of a project helps everything work, 24/7

Check out Liverpool Live by clicking here

How can a design consultancy, with a large number of full-time designers and many more freelancers, cope in an office with bad broadband when their portfolio of famous name brands and local companies is growing by the day? The short answer is they can’t. Or they couldn’t. Until Baltic Broadband was introduced to them by one of their clients with the words ‘they’ll sort it, give them a call.’ 

A bit of background is needed to highlight just how bad the situation had got for this central-Liverpool based company. Having upgraded to a brand new, Grade A office as part of their expansion, the team of designers assumed all of the facilities would be of the same high-quality as their new office space. However, having signed the long-term lease and being assured the building had fabulous connectivity, it soon turned into a nightmare for the creatives and administrative team members. Within six months the connectivity was so poor that regardless of how many different routers, cables and positions they tried in the office, that if more than one person was using the connection at any time they could barely email each other or run the apps they used to collaborate with their teams working remotely. Team members were being given USB sticks and hard drives to take to coffee shops or their own homes to upload files to their customers and their own virtual servers. This is no exaggeration. 

But how did it get this bad? Surely the building had broadband? Other tenants must be online, why not this team? Perfectly good questions. And the right ones. However, the story was about more than just broadband. Let me explain.

Upon signing the lease and moving the team into the office, the landlord then signed an exclusivity deal with a single ISP. The property owner had decided to maximise their revenues for the building by ‘renting space’ in the building to this ISP in return for the ISP getting guaranteed business from all of the tenants with no competition once their current contracts ended. And the ultimate twist for the design consultants? It was the provider they had used in their old property  and had found, to be polite, lacking. The provider the landlord had chosen was expensive, lacked basic customer support and locked customers into lengthy contracts with an SLA that meant removing the service due to poor speed or connectivity was almost impossible. For this team of creatives, not signing with this ISP was not just a matter of bad broadband, it was a matter of principle. They paid the landlord a healthy rent for the beautiful office. They paid the landlord significant service fees which was fine as the building and facilities were near perfect. With all of this in consideration, the team felt they did not need to be dictated to as to which ISP they used for their business. Particularly when that broadband provider had been so poor in their previous dealings. And so, at this point, the decision was made. They would just have to work harder and more creatively to get it to work. Coffee runs wouldn’t just be about getting lattes, but about getting online. Flexible working hours would no longer just be to beat the commute and a bit of a perk, but to upload vital files for customers and collaborators.

All of this, because they disliked the ISP being forced upon their business, and the manner in which it was being done.

So how did Baltic Broadband help a company when we couldn’t supply a service to their business. Well, to be honest, and we’ve checked with the solicitors and we can write this, we initially went to the landlord to ask if we could install one of our dishes on their roof. The size of a side plate. Hidden from view from the street. We prefer to do things the right way, and this was the right way to do things. The design consultants needed a service, and we could easily provide it. The landlord asked us for a fee to rent some space. The fee was approximately 5x what we would be charging the designers for their service. In short, it wasn’t a difficult business decision to say we would not pay the landlord to provide a service their customer needed desperately.

But we do not give up easily at Baltic Broadband…

The design consultancy had windows in their office. Which you would expect. So, simply, we placed our equipment in their window. They now have 350Mbps upload and download speeds. On a monthly rolling contract. But still get to do the coffee run and flexible working hours as they’re a lovely business, with a great company ethos and produce beautiful work. And we couldn’t be more proud to have helped them.

Imagine being a business owner and being told by a landlord that you can move into your new, beautiful, city-centre office and have the broadband switched on the same day. In Liverpool, it’s now a reality…

Landlords are constantly having to change with the times to attract new companies to their offices in city centres. Although from the outside of a building, a business may want a beautiful Georgian facade, a well-polished brass nameplate and immediate access into the city itself, once inside the property, their needs change dramatically. They may want traditional thick carpets. The lighting may need to be adjustable. The kitchen may need more than a kettle and a microwave. But the broadband? Well, the broadband just needs to be fast, stable, and if anything goes wrong it better be fixed. Quickly.

This is the challenge faced by multiple landlords in Liverpool city centre. Whilst the building they own may be beautiful, filled with history and ornate touches, the modern tenant needs it to reflect the reality of their working day. A day in which their teams are using email, VOIP, sending large files, video conferencing, accessing cloud-based software packages and possibly checking into the metaverse. All at the same time.

The reality of this was a challenge faced by a Baltic Broadband customer who was beginning to see tenants moving to new offices. And these tenants weren’t moving just because they preferred the warehouse aesthetic, or the cost, or having better transport links. They moved because these modern offices offered high-speed internet connections so they could actually do their jobs. 

So the landlord faced a challenge. Sell a property that had been in their family for generations, or take on the challenge: invest in infrastructure that made it impossible for a new company to turn down their city-centre office space. The next challenge was minimising the amount of time the property was closed for them to update the building and have to wait for paying tenants to return. The final challenge was to find someone who could offer value to the building and tenants which would make them sign the tenancy agreement.

At this point, the landlord did the traditional thing a landlord would do in this situation. Contacted BT, Virgin, all the usual business broadband suppliers they had seen in adverts and asked for the biggest, best broadband available. Money was no object.

“No problem, Landlord’ they all replied, “In six to nine months you will have a cable installed at a cost of thousands and then your customers can call us when they move in and we will have them installed in four to six weeks and they can sign up to 3-year packages”

This didn’t sound like a brilliant plan to the landlord. Having taken the building back to brick, the broadband companies were then going to be smashing holes in freshly plastered walls, which would need to be replaced. Additionally, tenants moving to the building would either wait until broadband connections could be arranged or move into an office without a connection for some period, which seemed an unlikely scenario. Doing the maths, it would mean the building was generating no income for nearly 12 months.

So, by chance, as this particular company did zero marketing, a colleague recommended a local business called Baltic Broadband and asked if they could help.

The solution provided was to make their building a Baltic Broadband Enabled Building (BBEB). As a company led by a Chartered Engineer, Baltic Broadband was able to work with builders to pre-install cables whilst waiting for a fixed-line, reducing waste and cost. Furthermore, by backing up bandwidth power by using their wireless business broadband via the roof, tenants would be able to move in almost as soon as the paint dried.

By using the Baltic Broadband network, the property was now capable of supplying speeds of up to 10Gbps which could be switched on in a day to any business moving into their new office. In addition, Baltic Broadband helped market this service to potential tenants, liaising with business owners, IT departments and managed service suppliers to talk through their individual needs and shopping lists. 

Baltic Broadband took the hassle away from the landlord, added value to their sales pitches and, most importantly, offered a service to tenants that kept them happy and in the building. Because that’s the thing that never changes for landlords. They want happy tenants who pay their bills. Baltic Broadband help make that happen.

What happens when an entire estate of companies is unable to get online but are tied into contracts with landlords for the property? Some leave when their contract finally ends. Some continue to ask for BT Openreach engineers to fix the problem and lose more time and money as no solutions are found. But some companies on the Paul Street and Blackstock Street Industrial Estate got together, contacted Baltic Broadband and asked how we can fix the problem that was blighting their business. These companies were committed to regenerating the area and wanted a partner who could find a solution despite scepticism about a company that they had never heard of.

And so, business owners on the estate approached Baltic Broadband and spoke about their problems. An engraving and sign making business that could barely send files internally between the design and production teams. A virtual reality experience centre that struggled to keep a solid connection for paying customers. A brochure printing business that couldn’t upload files from their customers in the NHS and local government that needed to be printed NOW! It was frustrating. It was damaging their reputations. It was costing them time and money. It was affecting their insurance cover when they couldn’t even guarantee a stable connection for their security cameras.

Within two weeks of contacting Baltic Broadband, The Paul Street and Blackstock Street Industrial Estate had access to 10Gbps of stable, fast broadband to service all the companies affected by the poor service. Where offices had previously suffered from average download speeds of 7Mbps and uploads at just 4Mbps, their teams now achieved symmetrical speeds of 350Mbps for downloads and uploads. Teams could again focus on their task of providing amazing service to their customers. And with monthly rolling contracts, they knew that if anything else went wrong on the estate they didn’t need to worry about paying exit fees to their broadband providers should they have to move on. That’s the difference Baltic Broadband can make.