The Bandwidth Decision for Today’s Small and Medium Businesses

By Mushroom Networks’ Cahit Akin

Small and medium-sized businesses today are provided with an interesting dilemma when choosing their Internet connectivity options.

Historically, synchronous T1/E1 services have been the only option for companies requiring decent uplink bandwidth. The symmetric T1 provides 1.54mbps symmetrical Internet connectivity and unless the company is willing to pay a fortune for higher tier connectivity options, T1 has been providing the best value for dollar spent per bit.

If, however, downlink is the primary need for the company, the newer asynchronous Internet delivery technologies provide a significantly better value for dollar spent per bit, and I mean significantly.

Cable has been dragged by the fact that it never had business customers in mind. Although there are aggressive efforts to increase the footprint of cable modem coverage in North America for businesses, it is still very common to not have coverage for businesses. DSL does not have the coverage issues, but similar to cable, lacks the uplink speeds. The newer DSL standards are promising much higher speeds, but only for very short distances. Over certain distances, the performance of VDSL reduces to your good-old ADSL. So the uplink remains as a major roadblock in front of these asynchronous technologies.

Having laid out the dilemma that lies in front of every small business today, in my next post I will address some of the approaches that the industry has been working on, the pros and cons of those approaches and what they really mean for the business as a service.

Dr. Cahit Akin is co-Founder and CEO of Mushroom Networks. Before co-founding Mushroom Networks, he was a principal and then a venture partner at ITU Ventures for seven years. ITU Ventures is the venture capital arm of Brownstein Schnel Holdings, which has invested in more than 50 companies whose total equity capital is more than $2 billion. Akin was the founder of Respectrum and he co-founded and invested in Mushroom Networks.

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