Business vs Residential UFB, why the huge difference in cost??

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Business vs Residential UFB, why the huge difference in cost??

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pchs

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#1026198 16-Apr-2014 13:37

You will also find that in many cases the LFC will refuse to provide a Residential UFB service to an RSP in a Business Area, or to address that they deem to be for business activity's. This used to be the same case many years ago under Telecom with UBS, and in some cases is still similar with Telecom Business POTS versus Residential POTS (try and get a Residential POTS line installed into a business area)

There are also differences between install costs too, where in most cases Residential installs are subsided by the LFC and Government to the point of being free for Residential installs.

In the opposite scenario Business services, in most cases can be installed into Residential areas, as you could well have a home business that needs a business SLA.

networkn

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#1026211 16-Apr-2014 13:45

TimA:
dman: So could I sign up for a residential plan at a business address in the city? (as I'll be living there after all, so for me it is "residential")

Usually an ISP will prefer you to use a business service for a business use. Don't come winging to us or your ISP when they tell you "Give us 72 hours for a result or solution"

Well to be fair, a lot of ISP's that offer consumer and business offerings seem to have 'business' support 8x5 vs consumer support 24/7 or least least 12/7.

nitrotech

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#1026222 16-Apr-2014 14:10

Keep hearing about these wonderful SLAs for business but no one's popped up yet with exactly what they are.

In the background I'm sure for a business connection they will perhaps push harder to get your issue sorted however at the end of the day these so called business plans are just a best effort service with no particular commitments at all from the RSP.

Oh and they are twice the price with 1/3rd of the data because remember UFB is for downloading illegal movies not for business purposes ;-)

Jaxar

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#1026287 16-Apr-2014 15:42

nitrotech: Keep hearing about these wonderful SLAs for business but no one's popped up yet with exactly what they are.

In the background I'm sure for a business connection they will perhaps push harder to get your issue sorted however at the end of the day these so called business plans are just a best effort service with no particular commitments at all from the RSP.

Oh and they are twice the price with 1/3rd of the data because remember UFB is for downloading illegal movies not for business purposes ;-)

You have a valid point. SLA is a convenient abbreviation we all understand but it isn't really accurate from a pedantic point of view here as you average business plan does not come with a signed Service Level Agreement negotiated into a specific contract. You get that at a Corp and Government level on a point to point fibre connection however you are also paying ~10X your standard business price at that point as well.

Having said that I've worked as business tech support for fixed line and broadband and my experience is that there is a service difference between business and consumer.

Please note: I have a professional bias towards Vodafone.

BinaryLimited

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#1026296 16-Apr-2014 15:52

Checkout voyager for business ufb,they quite good.

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pchs

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#1026312 16-Apr-2014 16:22

networkn:
TimA:
dman: So could I sign up for a residential plan at a business address in the city? (as I'll be living there after all, so for me it is "residential")

Usually an ISP will prefer you to use a business service for a business use. Don't come winging to us or your ISP when they tell you "Give us 72 hours for a result or solution"

Well to be fair, a lot of ISP's that offer consumer and business offerings seem to have 'business' support 8x5 vs consumer support 24/7 or least least 12/7.

Would you really sign up your business to a service that did not have a 24/7 support desk? there are often issues on GZ re things like not getting domain support etc in afterhours and the issues this casues? you can log faults with LFC's 24/7 so if you had a fault and your RSP was not open to take your call you would be quite stuck, I.E if the fault happened on a Friday night and your RSP was only say 8-6 Mon-Fri then the earliest your fault would be logged with an LFC would be Monday.

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dman

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#1026513 16-Apr-2014 23:45

Well, I've made clear already I reckon a SLA is pretty unimportant to me when I've got plenty of other back up options easily at hand if it is urgent (or just living without the internet for a little while and working on something else, as will probably be the case 80% of the time I suppose).

As another aspect of running a successful business is managing costs, so I'd much much rather spend less and get more! (so why can't they other the choice of residential plans too? I understand some minor differences around connection costs, but the rest doesn't make sense)

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raytaylor

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#1027154 18-Apr-2014 00:55

dman: Well, I've made clear already I reckon a SLA is pretty unimportant to me when I've got plenty of other back up options easily at hand if it is urgent (or just living without the internet for a little while and working on something else, as will probably be the case 80% of the time I suppose).

Your bigger problem is going to be that due to government residential subsidies, your business address may not qualify for residential pricing.

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Coil

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#1027157 18-Apr-2014 01:22

dman: Well, I've made clear already I reckon a SLA is pretty unimportant to me when I've got plenty of other back up options easily at hand if it is urgent (or just living without the internet for a little while and working on something else, as will probably be the case 80% of the time I suppose).

I bet if you have a fault the CSR would get light up with the old "I run a business from home" "I am losing money" "what compensation will i get"
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networkn

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#1027158 18-Apr-2014 01:26

Jaxar:
nitrotech: Keep hearing about these wonderful SLAs for business but no one's popped up yet with exactly what they are.

In the background I'm sure for a business connection they will perhaps push harder to get your issue sorted however at the end of the day these so called business plans are just a best effort service with no particular commitments at all from the RSP.

Oh and they are twice the price with 1/3rd of the data because remember UFB is for downloading illegal movies not for business purposes ;-)

You have a valid point. SLA is a convenient abbreviation we all understand but it isn't really accurate from a pedantic point of view here as you average business plan does not come with a signed Service Level Agreement negotiated into a specific contract. You get that at a Corp and Government level on a point to point fibre connection however you are also paying ~10X your standard business price at that point as well.

Having said that I've worked as business tech support for fixed line and broadband and my experience is that there is a service difference between business and consumer.

I'd agree, one typically operates 24/7 and the other does not.

dman

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#1027211 18-Apr-2014 09:32

raytaylor:
dman: Well, I've made clear already I reckon a SLA is pretty unimportant to me when I've got plenty of other back up options easily at hand if it is urgent (or just living without the internet for a little while and working on something else, as will probably be the case 80% of the time I suppose).

Your bigger problem is going to be that due to government residential subsidies, your business address may not qualify for residential pricing.

Oh damn those government subsidies distorting the market....

networkn:
Jaxar:

Having said that I've worked as business tech support for fixed line and broadband and my experience is that there is a service difference between business and consumer.

I'd agree, one typically operates 24/7 and the other does not.

At first it can seem weird that consumer support is better, but as they have far far more consumer customers than business customers it can kinda make sense. They ought to roll both into just one point of support.

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networkn

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#1027227 18-Apr-2014 10:03

dman:
raytaylor:
dman: Well, I've made clear already I reckon a SLA is pretty unimportant to me when I've got plenty of other back up options easily at hand if it is urgent (or just living without the internet for a little while and working on something else, as will probably be the case 80% of the time I suppose).

Your bigger problem is going to be that due to government residential subsidies, your business address may not qualify for residential pricing.

Oh damn those government subsidies distorting the market....

networkn:
Jaxar:

Having said that I've worked as business tech support for fixed line and broadband and my experience is that there is a service difference between business and consumer.

I'd agree, one typically operates 24/7 and the other does not.

At first it can seem weird that consumer support is better, but as they have far far more consumer customers than business customers it can kinda make sense. They ought to roll both into just one point of support.

At the end of the day, most businesses now operate far more hours than 8-5, and I believe MOST businesses would happily pay a premium for premium support, but even with RSP's like VF who run extended hours, it doesn't help if you have a fault that requires Chorus
as in my experience they don't run a contract with Chorus for extended hours. Best you can hope to do is log the call earlier than with an RSP who doesn't have "extended" hours.

I would say in my experience (and I have a reasonable amount) the level of support offered by business helpdesks is usually better, they tend to run much smaller teams and they are easily overwhelmed causing the problem to end up taking longer to fix. Orcon was a prime example of that. They then fixed it,
by boosting numbers with inexperienced people which was worse, plus feedback channels were much worse as the infrastructure was smaller and more stretched.

raytaylor

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#1027412 18-Apr-2014 16:06

A business helpdesk could almost be described as Level 2 support as the first point of contact, where as a typical residential desk will be level 1 where they run through the standard scripts before lodging a ticket with level 2.

A business desk you can call and say "my outgoing port 25 happens to be blocked even though it was unblocked yesterday"
The correct business desk reply would be "okay can you please telnet into this address for me as a test..."

A residential desk reply would be "Have you tried changing your filters?"

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