One of our most interesting products to be developed this year at Fluidata has been the VOX 2.0 service. For the past 18-months Fluidata has been using the Telefonica O2 network for the deployment of ADSL2+ services to our client base. This network supports the O2 and Be client bases with Fluidata taking a direct interconnect into the back of the network to offer a range of business grade services.
The network now boasts over 1,200 exchanges nationwide and is without doubt the most advance DSL network in the UK, especially when Fluidata gets it hands on it! One of the first things we did was successfully deploy Annex-M technology allowing the upload to double from 1.3 Mb/s to 2.6 Mb/s in optimum conditions. This was achieved 6-months before it was available anywhere else and is so good that we have customers over 3,000 meters from the exchange successfully receiving 2 Mb/s upload.
Larger SME and Enterprise companies still shy away from DSL technology but with the use of our aggregation technology we are able to offer it as part of a bundle of products from different carriers providing seamless failover should there be a network issue. However what we perceived as being the selling point ‘up to 20 Mb/s down’ doesn’t seem to be what our client base were buying it for. And now that we have capped the download to 2.6 Mb/s and lowered the contention of the line we have seen a larger take-up by business clients looking for a SDSL (2 Mb/s) alternative.
Tiscali Business I believe are following suit with their network (only 18-months late guys!) offering clients leased line based service but using the ADSL network instead of relying on SDSL or older copper based leased lines.
Benefits to the customer are quick installs, larger UK footprint and shorter contract terms (as low as 3-months instead of 12-months). With BT making no further SDSL investment and their imminent ADSL2+ technology only managing 1.3 Mb/s upstream I expect to see more businesses move to this type of technology.
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