It’s amazing, just the other day I was looking at the Internet costs for a client; in three years there monthly cost for ADSL had dropped from $450 to $90.  This decrease in costs has come about though increased competition and a larger install base.  But a lot of people, me included, have been missing the point of Internet access.  Sometimes the most important factor is not the cost on its own.  As the cost of ADSL has dropped other factors have started to have a heavier weighting in the decision making process.

Cheaper ADSL Internet has meant more people on line and a less efficient service.  ADSL is now slower than it was 5 years ago, seems there are more outages and the level of expertise available on support calls to ISP’s can be pretty poor.  On top of that we now use the Internet differently.  Once the Internet was used mostly for email and browsing the web.  Those two things still take place with email growing in importance.  But for a lot of companies the most important use of the Internet is remote access.

Remote access might be a VPN into a terminal server, a link between remote offices, or external access to email or web-based information.  The big difference between this and the traditional use of the Internet is that it’s about being outside the network and coming in.  Rather than being inside the network looking out.  This just happens to be ADSL Internets weak point.

As ADSL has become the cheap Internet access of the home user, while traditional corporate access methods have dropped in price and spread in availability.  Fibre is now widely available and you can get 25GB at a full 5 Megs each way for around $550 per month.  Kinetics is now on fibre and the difference between that and ADSL is not just faster access, but reliable access with the ISP's commitment to quality support. 

At Kinetics we run two Internet connections, one is our business connection, email, remote access, Activiser and PDA synchronization etc.  The other is a flat rate ADSL connection which is the default path for web browsing.  This keeps our fast access available for critical business use while letting staff browse the internet; youtube etc at the cheap rates of ADSL.  If the ADSL runs slow or fails altogether, our email and those other business activities continue on.  (Actually I suspect that when the ADSL goes down, those other business activities may even increase!!)

I guess I could sum up the difference between ADSL and Fibre as similar to that of Prepaid Phones and a Mobile Phone account.  Prepaid Phones are a great way to control costs, but I’m not aware of any businesses that issue them to their staff for business purposes.  Sometimes ADSL is the right choice, but business needs do change and do need to be reviewed.  

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