Climbing up the verticals

The best way is for resellers to get as far up the hierarchy as they can without being dwarfed by supplier that can take of leave their business. Most ISPs operate to their limit, so partners can get a variable service.

"Questions should be asked of past investment and ongoing investment in the network and product innovation, of the company's track record and ongoing management structure of contention rates and of user profiles."

Griffin Internet for example has a client base that never exceeds its limits on bandwidth or user contention. At peak times its capacity is never more than 75% full. However after 6pm its network use runs at 25% capacity. This is because Griffin does not have any residential users. This has allowed Griffin's partners to offer its banking clients for example security services over broadband.

And this is what is vital for resellers: picking the right vertical market, which allows them to add value to any broadband sales.

Andrew Dickinson, sales and marketing director, Griffin, says: "Being able to help resellers offer applications and add-on sales to target vertical sectors is a good way for us to help VARs get more margin."

Griffin internet also carried all of the voice traffic for second tier suppliers such as HipCom, Teleware and Kingston, which then sell their capacity on to resellers.

Up until recently the tills at shops across the nation have used ISDN to conduct online credit card verifications. This is all changing. With retailers being forced to adopt chip and pin and with ISDN being phased out the retail industry is looking for alternative broadband service suppliers. Griffin Internet and its partners are doing particularly well in this area.

"We have got some massive prospects in our bidding machine at the moment," Dickinson says. "There are retail projects where the customer will need about 1000 lines one for each shop. In total we have about 50,000 potential line orders that we are bidding for through our partners."