Scouting Out Options in Business Internet

Thursday, January 05, 2006, at 06:28PM

By Eric Richardson

I'm looking into business Internet connectivity this evening. It's more interesting than I thought it would be. Basically it's a situation where we need a good downlink, and a pretty strong uplink, but traffic levels aren't enough to warrant T1 level service.

There are more options available here in Downtown than I would have guessed. Traditional ADSL is a strong contender, but there are also various other things to consider such as SDSL and WiMax. As Alan just asked me, "Isn't competition great?"

ADSL

When it comes to ADSL, it would take a lot to get me to look at anyone other than Speakeasy. I've used them for my personal connectivity since May of 2003, and I couldn't be more happy with how it has worked. The only instability I've had was the result of my roommate not putting a DSL blocker on his phone.

Speakeasy offers their business One Link ADSL with 6.0Mbit down and 768Kbit up for $125.95. 768 is a very decent uplink, but nothing spectacular. It's the same thing I have here at the apartment.

SDSL

SDSL is cool because you get the same speeds both up and down. In a situation where you're doing a good outgoing traffic (a server) or sending out big files that's a big plus. The downside, though, is that SDSL is expensive.

For instance, XO Communications has 768Kb SDSL for $170/mon. Speakeasy doesn't list their rate for 768Kb, but seeing as 192Kb is $120/mon and 1.5Mb is $299, I'd imagine it's about $200 - $220.

SDSL connections do, though, generally have a better Service Level guarantee. For instance, Speakeasy's SLA on the One Link ADSL is 99.0% uptime guaranteed, while for SDSL it's 99.9%. That make seem the same, but if you're up 99% of a year you're down 3 days, 15 hours and 40 minutes. If you're up 99.9% you're only down 8 hours and 46 minutes each year. But does that really matter for office connectivity? Perhaps not.

WiMax(-ish)

There are two fixed-point wireless Internet providers that I've seen operating Downtown: TowerStream and NextWeb.

TowerStream has an interesting package, though it's far beyond what I'm looking for (or would want to pay): 5Mb for $500/mon. It's really 1.5Mb with an SLA, and then 3.5Mb extra "best effort", but I would suspect that with the conditions here you get the upper end of that more often than not.

NextWeb does the same sort of thing as TowerStream, but instead of "best effort" bandwidth you get burstable bandwidth. You can get 384Kb burstable to 3Mb for $159/mon, or 1.5Mb burstable to 6.0Mb for $399/mon. The website doesn't get too far into details about defining "burstable".

I'm not sure about the practicality of wireless for companies without an easy roof access. NextWeb's site mentions a window mount, but I don't know how comfortable of a setup that is.

Final Thoughts

No decision at this point (this was more of a fact finding mission). I guess what I really come away wishing is that we could just throw a cable over to somebody like XO, since they have a data center directly across the street. Downtown LA is definitely telco-rich.