The chances are you depend on your business internet service for some, if not many, of your business activities. If you’re keen to improve productivity, it’s worth considering if enhanced solutions like business grade fibre could be best for your business operations. Here we consider key benefits that could help your business.
Business grade fibre offers any organisation the speed and network quality once reserved for large enterprises. But how much does the speed and quality of your internet service influence how you do business?
The Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research – a federal government agency – recently conducted research to discover the productivity benefits of high-speed broadband. They found evidence of a link between a firm’s productivity growth and their use of high-speed broadband.
Businesses with fibre-based broadband benefited most. They reported the highest productivity growth when compared with all other broadband types. Business grade fibre internet can offer a range of benefits to businesses, underpinned by enhanced features that can improve the experience of your customers and team.
Business-grade fibre can help deliver better fast, reliable business internet that’s essential to today’s business operations. The performance of critical applications like video conferencing, file sharing or cloud-based apps, can be affected by the quality and speed of your business internet connection. With smoother performance you can avoid wasting time waiting for files to download or interacting with cloud-based applications that are struggling to load quickly enough.
The enhanced performance of business grade fibre is underpinned by low latency, symmetrical speeds, and higher bandwidth options. Uncontended connections and service level agreements (SLAs) can also help maximise your business productivity.
Latency is the round-trip time it takes for data to go from one point to another. Or put simply, the response time. The lower the time, the better. Low latency helps deliver a smooth experience for this like video conferencing. Think about video calls you’ve been on where screens have frozen or voices have sounded robotic due to buffering. Low latency helps you avoid this. And business-grade fibre offers very low latency for superfast response times.
Symmetrical speeds means that equal speed is allocated for your uploads and downloads, even at peak times. You'll see the benefit in apps like video conferencing or when needing to upload large files.
Some providers will also actively manage capacity across all their network links to avoid congestion and keep your internet fast.
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data your connection can handle at any moment. The higher the bandwidth or speed, the more data you can transmit at once.
If you use bandwidth-intensive apps such as video conferencing, or you regularly transfer data to cloud services, you can choose higher bandwidth options to ensure your apps perform better.
Some business grade fibre solutions offer uncontended connections. Standard business internet services are generally offered via contended connections. This means the ‘pipe’ is being used by multiple organisations at the same time.
An uncontended connection is a dedicated internet connection that’s not shared with other businesses or users. Since the connection is not shared it can offer greater reliability for your business, which isn’t impacted by the usage levels of other organisations.
Business grade fibre solutions can come with service level agreements (SLAs) which define the level of service you can expect from your supplier in terms of things like how quickly they will respond to issues.
If you opt for a higher end business internet service such as business grade fibre you will likely find you have access to higher end SLAs as part of the service. SLAs can help give you more confidence that, in the event of any issues, you’ll have the support you need to minimise impacts on business continuity.
Consistent, quality digital experiences can help you connect with your staff and customers. Internet downtime has consequences for businesses. These range from inconvenience to lost data, lost revenue and reputational damage.
That’s why business grade fibre internet services are built for reliability with a high level of service availability. We know it’s critical to your smooth business operations and delivering a great experience for your customers and team.
Telstra’s network target availability – the percentage of the time when the network service is available – is 99.95% for solutions supported by Telstra Fibre and nbn EE services. This can be further enhanced up to 99.995% with the addition of LTE backup or one of the redundancy options available on Telstra Fibre. LTE coverage is required to add the LTE backup option.
To help ensure you have a smooth transition to fibre, your local Telstra Business Technology Centre team can support your implementation.
If you’re considering whether an upgrade to business grade fibre makes sense for your business, here are some questions you can ask.
If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, a business grade fibre service may be the right solution for you.
Enhanced performance offered by business grade fibre can enable you to adopt digital tools and apps such as cloud-based business solutions more seamlessly. And this can help boost your productivity, offering you greater more confidence they’ll be fast and responsive.
Originally published June 2023, modified October 2024
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