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.
Source: Comms Dealer January 2010.
Andrew Dickinson
