A new survey of 100 senior IT strategists at UK organisations of all sizes, which was published by Zen Internet today, has revealed that 22% of businesses have adopted FTTC superfast broadband for their office WAN connectivity; the same proportion as those with dial-up. But Leased Lines remain dominant.
The study, which was conducted by Computing, claims to represent a broad mix of organisations, including 38% from small businesses (up to 500 employees) and 36% from larger enterprises (5,000 employees or more).
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Interestingly it found that 41% of firms had suffered “intermittent service outages” with their WAN connectivity solution or ISP, while 25% claimed to have experienced poor performance and another 25% complained of poor support. Thankfully only 6% had been hit by a complete service loss for a “long period“. But in terms of technology choice it’s clear that Leased Lines reign supreme.
It goes without saying that most businesses of scale tend to be sensible enough to use more than one connectivity solution (redundancy), which is why the survey allowed respondents to pick more than one answer. This partly also explains why dial-up is still so prevalent, although we remain surprised to see that it was still used by 22% of respondents; the same level as FTTC.
Steve Warburton, Zen Internet Sales Director, explained:
“There are lots of headlines about building even faster networks in the future, but generally a lack of easy to understand information about fibre optic broadband services available today. We are concerned that in combination this is slowing the uptake of faster services that are available to about 50% of premises in the UK today.”
The study also asked IT strategists whether they ever considered “purchasing cheaper but less reliable broadband connections instead of more expensive, guaranteed bandwidth alternatives“. Some 43% gave a flat “No“, while 40% felt it was dependent upon the application, 10% said “Yes” they had considered cheaper connections and surprisingly 7% didn’t even know what the difference was.
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