Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t usually attract much thought when we select them, coasting along in the background of our mind, until something goes wrong. Who do I call to get this sorted? Which department do I speak with? How long am I going to wait on hold?
It’s no surprise that customer satisfaction rankings for ISPs are amongst the bottom quarter of industries as tracked by Roy Morgan and even here at Xenex we find the big players like Telstra and Optus exceptionally painful to deal with. So, what’s the solution? We’ve just started our own ISP!
Many businesses are now electing to engage independents like us and at last count, over 2,000 of them have popped up across Australia. Let’s look at why independent is better:
1. Faster Speeds
Ever notice your internet connection suffering a 3pm slump? This happens when more people are online, returning home from school and work. The larger ISPs typically cram a greater number of customers on each connection. You’re then forced to share a limited amount of upstream capacity because the ISP banks on everyone not being online at the same time – causing network contention. Xenex limits the number of links on each connection, so you have more dedicated bandwidth available to maintain your speeds.
2. Higher Quality
Speed isn’t the only thing you’ll often compromise with a general ISP. Some independent ISPs like Xenex will enable a direct peering with Amazon AWS, our hosting provider. For clients who use our VOIP phone systems, the voice quality is far improved when compared to a less direct connection.
3. Improved Security
Clients using Xenex to host their server can deploy a direct connection to our hosting infrastructure. Instead of using a public, shared internet connection via the cloud, you have a private, secure connection. A faster, safer path reduces your compliance risk with confidential information like customer records.
4. Less outages
Even just an hour of disrupted internet supply in a business can mean massive losses in productivity. Independent ISPs safeguard against many outages by running our internet connections to multiple points of presents. If one location is suffering an outage, you’re more likely to remain up as you’ll just default to another.
5. Local, consistent point of contact
There’s been a significantly increased priority in supporting local businesses over the last couple of years, and your ISP can be one of them. Know that they’re probably within half an hours drive from you and not in a call centre.
6. Service Synergy
A lot of new ISPs like ours have been established by existing IT service providers. This is not only a nice value add offering for existing clients, but streamlines your experience as a customer. There’s one less supplier for you to deal with and the people who know every other aspect of your IT infrastructure can now manage your internet supply more effectively to offer a better quality service.
7. Flexibility
Because you’re not buying from a giant rigid enterprise, you can customise a plan that suits your requirements. Don’t pay for what you don’t need – we do line tests on your business premises to find out what speed you could potentially get from your local exchanges. This means we’ll only ever supply you with a realistic speed plan, instead of ripping you off with a speed that isn’t even available at your location.
We can also connect internet services together, through “bonding” we can run multiple services together and load balance. This essentially creates a super service that will support businesses that have particularly heavy requirements of their ISP.
Xenex established our own Independent ISP because we felt it aligned with our ethos of providing value to our customers through smarter IT systems. If you’re interested in improving your internet supply, call us today or enquire through the form below.