Posted: 17th May, 2006 By: MarkJ
Business ISP Entanet has decided to universally upgrade (regrade) its entire customer base onto BT's new 'up to 8Mbps' ADSLMax technology. Enta has also criticised rivals for being too slow or unable to do the same:
Subscribers to Entanets MAX PAYG and MAX Allowance services are all being upgraded and the company has also launched a new Extreme service, which delivers the highest speed the line can sustain with the additional benefit of unlimited usage.
With the higher speeds, customers will be able to get so much more out of the web. It will be much quicker to download large files and use video and audio on-demand on the web. We see massive potential for VoIP and other services and this is a tremendous opportunity both for our reseller Partners and all our customers throughout the UK, says Carol Davies, Broadband Manager at Entanet.
But while Entanet is providing the re-grade to its customers automatically and indeed has already upgraded most lines other ISPs are apparently waiting for customers to call them or moving very slowly indeed. Customers have responded well to the upgrade and the feedback weve been getting is excellent, says Davies.
But we also believe that many ISPs are not as advanced with their plans and have not yet gone to their customers offering to crank up the speed of broadband connections, so many business users are not yet running to their full potential speed.
Davies says that other ISPs are holding back either because they are not ready or they are not able to proceed with the upgrade at the present time. They are not offering the higher speeds either because they cannot do it or they do not want to she states.
Since early April, many broadband connections have been capable of supporting download speeds of up to 8Mbps although in practice, most connections will support around 6Mbps. Even if lines are only capable of supporting 4Mbps, this is twice as fast than the former 2Mbps maximum and will deliver a significant performance benefit.
It does, however, make provisioning the service much more complex for ISPs that do not have a network infrastructure or line capacity in place that is capable of managing the additional bandwidth. This may be another reason why ISPs are not offering the higher grade connection to all their customers right away. Some may be looking at what it will mean in terms of their capacity and contention issues. Entanet, fortunately, has no such issues, says Davies.Entas move is certainly to be welcomed, although a note of caution should be sounded while teething problems with the technology remain, such as those being reported by users around the Internet (disconnections, incorrectly set speeds etc.).
Much as stated earlier, those on ISPs offering them a choice would do well to hold off for another month or two until BT has ironed these issues out.