Move your customers higher up the broadband ladder

Organisations that are finding ADSL has its limitations are prime candidates for upgrading to SDSL

You can never have too much of a good thing. This certainly is true of bandwidth. No sooner do you give users Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) than they make their applications more sophisticated and start sending bigger files. This is bad news for the IT manager, but good news for the canny reseller that spots the opportunity to upgrade a customer to Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL).

Some organisations are finding that ADSL can have its limitations, especially if they have teleworkers who need fast file transfer between sites, or multiple sites that need video streaming or conferencing. Businesses such as these are the emerging market for SDSL.

Resellers should focus on key vertical markets such as multimedia and marketing companies when planning their SDSL strategies. Many of these upload massive files such as moving images and data, as well as downloading them. SDSL, which offers guaranteed high-capacity networking at equal upload and download speeds, provides the ideal solution.

Furthermore, SDSL has a contention ratio (the number of users sharing the same broadband line) of 10:1, compared with a minimum of 20:1 with some ADSL. The fewer users are sharing the line, the faster and more reliable the service is in times of heavy network demand.

Resellers that can demonstrate the return on investment that companies can achieve by cutting upload times can quickly win business in this area.

The broadband market is undoubtedly growing, and there are a huge number of potential sales to be made simply through educating the market. Migrating end-users from ADSL to SDSL allows resellers to increase revenues and expand into new markets.

With the host of value-added services available, SDSL is not just a connectivity sale. Instead, it forms the basis for partners to help customers get more out of their broadband. For resellers wanting to build their broadband customer base, moving end-users up the broadband value chain to SDSL is a great opportunity.

Rakesh Mahajan is general manager marketing and strategy at BT Indirect Channels.