Subscribers to Entanet’s 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.
“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 we’ve 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.
The Higher Speed products are rate adaptive, meaning that the connection will adapt to the conditions to provide the best connection at the time. Connections will be monitored during the first 10 days of service and after 10 days the Maximum Stable Rate is calculated. A comprehensive FAQ about the Higher Speed products and the new terminology involved is available from Entanet.
Entanet is happy to offer continued guidance and support to resellers and will also continue to offer free migration to any partner and their customers that want to make the switch to Entanet’s range of broadband connections. “Scores of users migrate to Entanet every week” says Davies. “It costs them nothing and puts them onto a service that delivers the highest standards of reliability and performance.”
This comment was backed up by Entanet reseller partner UKKFS.ORG. Managing Director Jason Clifford who added: “Since switching to Entanet our users get much better service and faster speeds while we benefit from lower costs and far happier users. Each week we see a growing number of new customers migrating to us or signing up for new connections - all through customer recommendation.”
In addition, Entanet’s sister company, Entacall, is offering guidance to resellers that want to exploit the potential for VoIP sales. General Manager of Entacall, Else Chen, says that the arrival of the higher speeds expands the horizons for voice services significantly. “Customers recognise higher speeds on their broadband service as greater value for money, whilst for Partners it presents a tremendous opportunity to introduce Voice over IP as a value-add service, maximising sales revenue and optimising customer retention. We are very excited about the prospects and we’ll be doing all we can to encourage our Partners to look for new opportunities. We believe there is great potential in the VoIP market now that the broadband products become more attractive.”