We have been getting a lot of reports about offices, corporates, SMEs, businesses opting for residential home broadband internet plans for commercial reasons, which isn’t right. If you are someone, who is running residential broadband plan in your office, here are the seven things you need to keep in mind.

NO INSTANT SUPPORT

For home broadband, there is no instant support or phone support. It only has to go through the helpdesk support and get in the queue, and wait for atleast 24-48 hours depending on the queue. You of course donot want to wait if you are a business. So, you should not be using a residential broadband plan in your business setup environment. If you use business broadband plans, you are entitled to get free phone support, and the onsite support is normally within 12 hours for business broadband and for leased line circuits, its within 1-4 hours. If you are a serious business, you need to get leased line and if you are a small business, who can wait during the downtime, then you should be okay with any of the business broadband plans. But of course not residential home broadband.

NO REDUNDANCY SUPPORT

Business Broadband and Leased Line Customers if connected via fiber, we would free them a free wireless backup addon, so that even during the fiber downtime, which normally takes time, they can still stay connected and online over our wireless backhaul. But if you are using a residential plan being an office, then you have no such options, but to wait for the fiber to fix. You will stay disconnected until the fiber is fixed. So, no redundancy.

SLOWER UPLOAD SPEEDS

Residential Broadband Plans have slower upload speeds set, as its cheap. If you are an office or business, you need to go for business broadband or leased line connection, which is normally loaded with symmetrical speeds for both download and upload.

NO PRIORITY QOS

There is no priority QoS for residential broadband. Your internet can fluctuate depending on many factors and you wont be able to question the ISP, as broadband is shared network and it can get affected by any number of factors. If you are an office or business, you need to go for business broadband or leased line connection, which is normally set priority on the QoS standards and even sometimes on dedicated tunnels or dedicated routers at the ISP end.

NO SLA FOR SERVICES/UPTIME

Residential Broadband is always connected to the nearest hub, which has all customers connected to the same hub, while leased circuits are connected directly to the nearest dedicated hub to make sure there is no sharing and connectivity issue, for some or the other reasons. So, it is easier to offer SLA (Service Level Agreements) to the customer and Internet Leased Lines generally come with an SLA. While the business broadband plans doesnt come with any kind of SLA or agreements for performance guarantee. So, Internet Leased Lines are more reliable. 

Residential Broadband doesn’t come with any commitments or SLA.
Business Broadband comes with 95% SLA
Leased Line comes with 99.5% SLA.

Your ISP reserves the right to disconnect your services, if your usage tampers their UAP (user acceptable policy) or TOS (terms of service) or FUP (fair usage policy) or NAL (network abuse limit) in any means. And in this case, you are not entitled to get any kind of refund from the ISP too, since rental and installation once paid are non-refundable, non-adjustable, non-transferrable.