Infrastructure fears being overplayed
By Alex Scroxton
04 July 2008
Warnings that remote services providers keen to target the SME market might be unable to fulfil demand unless faster, reliable broadband is made an urgent priority have received a sceptical response.
A report from the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) issued last month suggested adoption of hosted online IT software services, including unified communications (UC) and software as a service (SaaS) would be hampered by slow broadband speeds.
“I see bandwidth becoming less of an issue,” said Richard Bligh, group marketing director at Gamma Telecom, who believed the situation was steadily improving. “We’re about to launch a VoIP product that guarantees 10 channels of voice upstream, which you could only have dreamed of 18 months ago.”
There can be no doubt that there are problems to be overcome, and patchy coverage in rural areas is still widely cited as an issue when it came to bandwidth. Delays to BT’s 21CN project and the slow roll-out of technologies such as symmetric digital subscriber lines (SDSL) were not helping, according to the ISP community.
Peter Gradwell, CEO at business internet specialist and Tiscali partner Gradwell.com, agreed that while SMEs in urban centres would probably experience few bandwidth problems, businesses in rural areas could still suffer.
“There are many people that want to use it, but I have loads of customers for whom it just doesn’t work, and as a hosted VoIP provider it’s difficult to prove it isn’t my fault,” he added.
Others, including Bligh at Gamma, put their faith in emerging technologies such as WiMAX.
Dave Millett, director at hosted UC provider Inclarity, said he was investigating WiMAX as well as evaluating compression technology. He
explained there were a number of products already available for hosted voice services that could be used without compromising call quality, for example.
Millett added, “WiMAX is easy to establish and it means we can offer guaranteed quality of service in areas where we struggle with SDSL, for
instance.”
On the SaaS front, debate continued as to whether bandwidth concerns were justified. Some believed there was psychological resistance among many small business owners, or suggested dated IT infrastructure could be to blame.
Simon Paton, managing director at UC specialist CommuniGate, warned that complex network infrastructures could prove troublesome.
“People want to use instant messaging within a salesforce environment, for example,” he said. “We want our partners to look at delivering hosted UC in a SaaS environment, but the fact is that SaaS is coming into a fantastically complicated environment already.”
Russell Wiltshire, director at hosted service desk provider Vivantio, said bandwidth questions were often raised during preliminary negotiations with users.
“But most of the time they are just expressing a fear that the broadband line will go down. It’s an emotional response, and in a typical SME, there are more serious risks than broadband reliability,” he said.
Duncan Gillingwater, director at SaaS reseller Clicks Management, had not seen bandwidth problems for some time. “Perception is changing,” he said. “These days people take it as read they will have pretty decent
access; the only issues I see are on out-of-date internal infrastructure.”
Bandwidth provision and broadband speeds have presented problems in Britain, but the industry has shown that some concerns might be overstated. Thousands of column inches on bandwidth-hogging applications such as YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer in mainstream media have created a perception that the internet is on the verge of collapse, and these exaggerated fears have spilled over into the business world.
