Source: Comms Dealer January 2010
Last Tuesday at 0900hrs one of our Partners received a
frantic call from a customer - their broadband line was down. Using the
Griffin portal they were quickly able to test the line and report the
fault directly to BT Wholesale (BTW) whilst their customer was on the
phone. However, only an hour later they escalated the fault to our
Partner Support team because the customer was still very unhappy and
threatening legal action. Despite the line being on BT's standard three
day SLA we managed to get an engineer out and the line was fixed before
five o'clock. The following day the Partner received a compensation
claim for many thousands of pounds. Their customer had become completely
reliant on their broadband and the office ceased to function when it
failed. This is not an uncommon scenario but we always wonder why the
end customer has allowed themselves to become so dependent on a service
that they are probably paying less than £30 per month for. Did the
salesperson explain that BTW were not obliged to clear (not even fix!)
the fault for 40 clock-hours? Furthermore even if it did take them more
than three days to clear the fault, the best that BTW might offer in
compensation is a month's line rental.
As companies start to use broadband for more than
just browsing and email, resellers need to find ways to improve the SLA
or risk a relatively low value product undermining their relationship
with what might be a very valuable client. Those resellers hoping to
persuade customers to put their desktop in 'the cloud' and pay them a
monthly rental will struggle if it means the client could potentially
sit there without phones, email or office applications for three days.
BT Openreach (BTOR) are trialling 5 hour fix products
in 2010 but whatever BTOR do, for business customers that cannot
tolerate any downtime many resellers are creating their own commercial
SLA by selling 'fail-over' solutions. If your ISP is a true aggregator
they will be able to run the same IP addresses over all the broadband
operators connected to their network. This means that a BT line
installed alongside an LLU line with a fail-over router will provide
your customer with near 100% uptime. What's more if you could sell this
product to all your customers you would double the monthly revenue from
your broadband estate.
Some ISPs have tried and failed to launch bonded
services that work, however I predict that in 2010 reliable bonding
services that go a step further than pure fail-over will be available.
These will allow the customer to use both the circuits at the same time,
increasing the overall speed of the combined connection and offering a
true leased line replacement. This will force leased line operators to
reduce the cost of Ethernet even further (prices have already come down
nearly 50% in the last 12 months) and as IP connections get cheaper,
faster and more reliable so we might finally see the boom in Software as
a Service (SaaS) and hosted voice that people have been predicting for
the last five years.
You will be pleased to hear that we had a happy
ending with the customer mentioned. Between us we supplied a fail-over
solution free of charge as a goodwill gesture and the compensation claim
was withdrawn. The Griffin Partner was happy because they sold a second
broadband line as a result.