While you might think that sticking with a residential connection while your business is in the early growth stages could save you some funds, the hidden issues of staying with a package that doesn’t serve you could cost your business thousands.
From increased risk of downtime to congested networks at peak times, not switching to a business-grade connection could hold your organisation back from reaching its next development stage. To help you make the right choice on your connectivity, we’ve created an all-you-need-to-know guide on the hidden horrors of staying on a residential connection as a growing business- providing the information needed to make an informed switch at the end of your contract.
The risks of staying with a residential connection
Here are some of the other risks of sticking with a residential package as a business:
- High impact of failure
One of the primary risks of staying with a residential connection involves a lack of service-level agreements (SLAs). SLAs provide users with a degree of assurance that in the event that their primary connection goes down, providers will work to restore service within a set number of hours. With a business-grade connection, this comes as standard with most providers, with priority support round-the-clock.
Residential connections lack basic SLAs, meaning in the event of a fault, you may face longer downtime, resulting in loss of revenue and disruption in customer experience.
- High contention during peak hours
Residential connections typically share bandwidth among multiple tenants, meaning users don’t get 100% of the connectivity potential. This means that peak times result in high rates of congestion, slower speeds, and increased latency. In residential properties, this mostly impacts streaming quality and loading times – with a lower impact of failure.
However, in business, this can result in interrupted video and voice calls with clients and slow file transfer rates, which may result in reputational damage and lower customer satisfaction rates - especially in industries like creative and media where organisations regularly transfer large media files.
With a business-grade connection, contention rates are significantly lower than the typical 1:20 in residential. When you’re thinking of switching providers or you’re approaching the end of your contract, make sure to check the contention ratios offered by specific business providers.
- No guarantee of headline speeds
Headline speeds refer to the fastest available speed advertised on a broadband package. However, on a residential package, there’s no guarantee you’ll even receive this. Some ISPs will advertise this as speeds “up to” a certain amount, but you may receive slightly less than this at any given time, especially during busy periods.
Business packages provide guaranteed speeds, which may come with compensation if you don’t receive the speeds you’re paying for. This means business connectivity provides users with greater assurance that they’re getting the speeds they’re investing in, and can continually perform the bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as using machine learning in customer relationship management, or host websites, without dramatic drops in speeds.
- Lack of Static IPs, limiting VoIP usage
Crucially, residential packages don’t typically offer static IP addresses, which are essential for the normal functionality of business applications via Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, remote access, and secure communication. This is because these applications like VoIP services use static IP addresses to ensure reliable call routing and improve security by allowing firewalls to accept traffic from known IP addresses.
This is one of the defining attributes of business-grade connectivity, as VoIP calling rapidly becomes the standard in most businesses thanks to quality and accessibility for remote and hybrid working.
Additionally, Static IPs resolve issues involving Network Adress Translation, which can impact call quality. With Static IPs, business connections prioritise VoIP traffic, providing a more consistent call performance which makes virtual customer interactions smoother.
Connect to a genuine business-grade connection with Faster Britain
Sticking with a residential-grade connection as a growing business comes with significant risks that can all stagnate growth and financial prosperity. However, understanding the risks and switching to a business-grade solution can help you maximise productivity and harness the power of bandwidth-hungry technology. If you’d like to learn more about the key differences between business and residential broadband, check out our expert guide here.
