The broadband market is as fast paced as ever as we start 2007. More and more resellers are now selling their own white-label broadband, maximizing revenues and protecting their base for the future.
MAX broadband hit the market in February 2006 and after a tentative start now represents 60% of all new lines that we sell. With upstream speeds as fast as 832kbit/s now widely available applications like VOIP have started to take off.
VOIP and IPCentrex vendors have been quick to see the benefits of using broadband to deliver their products and have been interconnecting with quality business ISPs that can guarantee safe passage to latency-intolerant applications like voice and video.
In busy-hour around 8% of our broadband lines are carrying SIP sessions with average bandwidth usage at that time of approximately 10kbit/s. This indicates that around one in ten of businesses are experimenting with VOIP but the average usage suggests the majority are not relying on it yet.
QoS (Quality of Service) has been a “buzz word” for a while in the industry. QoS is not necessary for VOIP so long as the ISP’s network is not congested and the customer only uses the broadband line for voice. But isn’t the point of convergence that customers can mix voice and data on the same circuit? Absolutely! Look out this year for the introduction of “Engineered Broadband”. Simply put the ability to prioritise voice packets over everything else at an individual broadband line level rather than a network level.
Source Comms Dealer February 2007.
Andrew Dickinson
