When the Olympics opens in London on the 27th July 2012 demand for bandwidth will inevitably increase, but nobody knows quite by how much.
Customers will complain of slow speeds on their broadband service whether their staff are watching the games on iPlayer or not, but there is something you can do to help prevent it.
Broadband is a shared service which means that other users on the same exchange watching the games online can significantly slow down your service.
Neither the carriers nor the ISPs can afford to increase capacity to accommodate this without raising prices. ISPs like Griffin have the ability to analyse the traffic and put actions in place to protect legitimate business traffic, but it is not an exact science and it is still unclear how BT will protect their local exchanges from congestion.
In the last 18 months demand for faster, more reliable Internet access with better service levels has seen Ethernet sales increase exponentially. Ethernet is not a shared service and your customers will always get all the bandwidth they pay for. If they allow their employees to use it to watch the Olympics, that is their choice.
As more carriers have entered the market so Ethernet prices have tumbled and the choice of products has widened. Resellers are converting customers on monthly broadband contracts worth 10s of pounds a month to 36 month contracts worth 100s of pounds a month. Churn is decreasing and the value of their businesses is increasing.
Lee Broxson, Head of Sales at Griffin commented, “The 2012 Olympics is a compelling event in more ways than one. It could just be the final reason that persuades your customers to trade up to Ethernet before their broadband is affected by streaming traffic at the end of July. Hurry, you only have 6 months to get the orders installed.”