Broadband gets back to business

With BT following Virgin into the market, now could be a good time to move customers away from ADSL to fibre optic connectivity, according to Henry West

The BlackBerry outage reported recently and broadly in the media was notable for one reason in particular: it concerned a loss of internet-based services that was not the fault of any ISP.

Alas, resellers with disgruntled customers knocking down their doors rarely have the luxury of shrugging their shoulders at such a problem, even though it may be way beyond their control. Too often, resellers end up having to pick up the pieces when something goes awry with the ISP they have recommended for broadband connectivity.

As an industry, ISPs routinely come last in surveys of technical service, support and responsiveness, and the hassle this can create for resellers - even when ordering lines, let alone confronting technical issues - is no joke.

If this were not bad enough, the margins available to resellers are beginning to be worth less than the cost of posting invoices to the customer. Look at the market at large and it is no wonder that reselling broadband can feel more like a poisoned chalice than a gilt-edged opportunity.

At least there is a market for broadband, and resellers have more power to exercise choice on behalf of their customers than ever before. However, piling it high and selling it cheap has many disadvantages, and resellers have to educate customers about that if they are to have any hope of changing the dynamics of demand. Unlike with other utilities such as electricity and water, extra internet service quality is worth the premium it attracts. That is often where you will find any extra margin.

Choice should certainly be exercised by those who feel they already have a well-established understanding of the ISP market, but if you have not focused on selling connectivity in the past, why on earth should you start now? What is the upside for a focus on selling broadband at all?

The old arguments still ring true. This is recurring revenue, and any reseller or IT services provider can quickly and easily bundle it up with the other offerings that it might want to provide.

Most importantly, however, resellers should ask how they plan to use it to support their close, unique, ongoing relationship of trust with individual customers. Somebody else is going to sell that connectivity to your customer if you do not, and certainly ISPs as one example would rather it were the reseller community.

One newer argument I have heard suggests that as enterprises of all sizes extend their adoption of cloud-based IT, they will increase their dependence on broadband connectivity.

We are living in an age where most businesses treat internet connectivity like oxygen. The broadband service is relatively invisible, and tends to be forgotten until they realise it has gone down, is too slow, or has developed some other issue that holds up their organisation’s processes and profits. Like oxygen for businesses, broadband is needed by every one of us to survive. This is the wave many resellers should be riding by offering managed services based on a suite of value-added technology smarts.

I would go even further and say the real opportunity for resellers is fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC), as in the Infinity infrastructure rollout being executed by BT Openreach. This presents resellers with the potential for the broadband equivalent of a rip-and-replace technology refresh, and there will be a growing number of providers eager to deliver it for them.

Pretty much all business customers already have connectivity, so this is a compelling reason for them to review their investment and buy into change. We believe in these instances that a customer will enjoy drastically increased access speeds at minor incremental cost. In other words, leased-line speeds within standard DSL price brackets.

None of this is quite as simple as it sounds, of course, and resellers must as usual look carefully at the market and develop their own formula that will deliver success.

Primarily, the margins available from the reseller’s choice of ISP have to exist. At least as importantly, to migrate existing installed business to FTTC-based services, the reseller’s choice of ISP needs to live up to the better standards of support on which business customers will depend.

With the increased bandwidth that FTTC should generally provide, businesses are likely to use more and therefore rely on it more. That will increase their need for the best support possible.

Make sure your rewards outweigh any risks, and broadband really is back in business.

Henry West is head of channel sales at Eclipse Internet