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Network management Toolkit

No free broadband for businesses

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 01 Aug 2006 09:20 BST

....might it have on the pricing of business broadband itself?

Sadly, the answer is "not a lot". The consensus is that there's a reason businesses pay more for their broadband, and it's not going to change because of the way services are marketed to the domestic user.

"There will undoubtedly be a number of small businesses for whom the free offer will be very tempting, and a lot will probably take it up," Matt Cantwell of business broadband provider Demon Internet tells ZDNet UK. "But we've actually won business from free broadband providers already, and free broadband's only been out for the last couple of months."

The biggest reason for this is quality of service. Internet service providers (ISPs) who offer free broadband are likely to try to put as many customers as possible onto the same network, to keep costs down.

This makes for variable speeds — something the home user might put up with, but hardly suitable for a business trying to send or receive large amounts of time-sensitive data. The usage limits imposed by most domestic ISPs are equally unwelcome in the world of business, but one of the strongest cases for business customers paying a premium is based on customer service.

"If you're running a very pared-down free service, if it's very successful, you may not have the customer service representatives available to be able to support your customers," Cantwell suggests, adding: "We're not going to charge you premium-rate numbers for calling technical support."

Business broadband providers also tend to offer things like multiple IP addresses, which are rather useful for running firewalls, VPNs, and other assorted network elements that a domestic user might find irrelevant, but most business users actively need.

Even Orange, which plans to roll out business broadband products next year, won't be taking their domestic approach into that market. "We still see there's an inherent value in business broadband just as we see with mobility," says a representative of the company's Business Services department. "We'll fight to retain that value in terms of what we charge our customers, but we certainly won't be going in with a free broadband tariff for businesses."

Orange does, however, have a halfway measure in the form of its "broadband for home workers" service. This allows large corporations using Orange for mobile services to combine their employees' work phone and home broadband bills, thus removing the need for workers to pay for home broadband themselves and claim it back from the company.

In other words, it's free home broadband again, only subsidised by a work phone rather than own phone contract. It is an "important first step in convergence", as Orange's representative points out, but it's also about as far as the "free broadband" concept is likely to go in the business environment.