The Business Communications Minefield

SDSL – Symmetric Synchronous Digital Subscriber Line

SDSL has a major advantage over ADSL in that you have the same upload speed as you have for download. In other words if you decide to purchase a 2Mb/s line you will get this speed for both upload and download speeds. In general this is the ideal for any business dependent on emails and uploading of information to the internet.

Current limitations of SDSL are that 

• Must be enabled in local exchange
• can only be used over copper,
• at time of writing most ISP only offer speeds of up to 2Mb/s

SDSL typically costs around £3580 per annum.
 

A Bone of Contention

An important factor when purchasing ADSL and SDSL lines are their contention ratios.  Contention ratios are the number of people who share your line. So if you have a 10:1 contention ratio, it means that ten other businesses or people are using the connection with you.

Now you can quickly see that the ideal contention ratio is 1:1 or zero contention which is essentially, your very own leased line. 

Otherwise your traffic speed could be affected by the amount of traffic that other businesses are sending.

If you have ever regularly experienced slow internet speeds at specific times of the day this is due to other users on your line. The higher the contention ratio, the greater the number of businesses sharing the same line and potentially the slower your line can be.