Broadband wholesaler XYZed today encouraged small and medium businesses to be careful when choosing a provider of high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services. According to Stephe Wilks, Managing Director of XYZed, businesses buying residential grade ADSL services without checking the 'fine print' may be making a costly and time-consuming mistake.

"Business buyers beware. Residential grade ADSL services only provide "best efforts" or "reasonable endeavours" quality of service and might only perform to advertised expectations occasionally," Mr Wilks said.

"DSL is a proven world class broadband technology" it's faster and more cost effective than alternative high-speed access services and has brought choice to businesses which found other leased line services such as ISDN too expensive," he said.

"But ADSL services that have been designed and priced for use in the home are entirely the wrong choice for business users. Residential grade ADSL does not offer service level agreements on quality or service availability, may well provide slower speeds than advertised and, may stop working altogether," he said.

"Worse still, when a residential grade ADSL service stops working, you have no way of knowing how long the service outage will last as there are no service restoration agreements and no rebates for the outage.

"Few businesses that depend on their access service can tolerate it slowing down or simply not being available, so choosing the wrong service and agreeing to a long term contract is a costly mistake," he said.

Mr Wilks recommends that businesses wanting to take advantage of the speed, security and flexibility of DSL services should look for business class service level agreements.

"The service you select should offer at least 99.9 per cent service availability, assured bandwidth throughput and service level agreements that provide specified service restoration periods and penalties for non performance," he said.

According to Mr Wilks only DSL services that are based on the ATM standards of Constant Bit Rate (CBR) or Variable Bit Rate (VBR) like XYZed's business class DSL services, are appropriate for business use.

"DSL services that are designed using CBR or VBR ensure that users get the bandwidth they pay for all the time, not just occasionally," said Mr Wilks.

"Residential grade ADSL services are based on Unspecified Bit Rate so there is no assurance of bandwidth throughput. The network is shared and service quality is affected by the number of users online and the amount of overall traffic on the ADSL network.

"The use of high-speed DSL technology will allow small and medium businesses to be more responsive, productive and flexible. But this new broadband work style will only be available to those businesses which choose their DSL service carefully," he said.

For further information:
Linda Collard
Cable & Wireless Optus
Phone: 02 9342 5045