Ask most business owners what broadband they are on and you will get one of three answers.
The name of their ISP. The speed at which they were quoted when they signed up. A shrug.
Very few can tell you whether they are on ADSL, FTTC, FTTP, SOGEA, or a leased line. Fewer still understand what the difference means in practice. And almost none have any idea whether what they are paying for is even remotely appropriate for the business they are running.
This matters. It matters rather a lot.
The connection your business runs on is not just an IT decision. It is a financial one.
Downtime is not bad luck. It is, in the vast majority of cases, the entirely predictable consequence of a procurement decision nobody thought very hard about.
The average cost of IT downtime to a UK small business is estimated at over £3,000 per hour. That figure accounts for lost productivity, missed orders, inability to communicate, and the slow bleed of staff sitting around, unable to work, while someone tries to figure out what is wrong with the internet.
Most businesses lose connection at some point. Many lose it regularly. And when they do, the conversation is almost always the same: was it the router? Is it the ISP? Has someone called them? Can we tether to a mobile?
It is rarely a conversation about whether the underlying connection was fit for purpose in the first place.
What you are probably on, and why it probably is not good enough
The majority of British businesses, particularly small and medium-sized ones, are running on one of two connection types: ADSL or FTTC.
ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) uses the copper telephone network. It is the broadband technology that has been around since the late 1990s. It typically delivers between 10 and 24 Mbps download and often under 1 Mbps upload. It degrades with distance from the telephone exchange. And it shares the same ageing copper infrastructure that BT has been trying to retire for the better part of a decade.
FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) is what most people mean when they say 'fibre broadband.' It is not, strictly speaking, full fibre. The connection runs as optical fibre from the exchange to the green cabinet on the street, and then continues as copper from the cabinet to your premises. Typical speeds range from 35 to 80 Mbps download, but upload speeds remain modest, often 10 to 20 Mbps at best.
For a business with four or five users making the occasional video call and sending emails, FTTC is probably adequate. For a business of ten or more people relying on cloud applications, video conferencing, VoIP telephony, large file transfers, and remote access, it is frequently not.
The problem is that nobody told them that when they signed up.
The upload problem nobody talks about
Download speed is what ISPs advertise. It is also, for most business applications, the less important number.
When your team is on Microsoft Teams or Zoom, the upload and download demands are roughly symmetrical. When you are working in cloud applications, saving files to SharePoint, backing up to the cloud, or sending large attachments, upload speed is the constraint.
ADSL and FTTC connections are asymmetric by design. The upload capacity is deliberately limited because the technology was originally built for consumers who download far more than they upload. Business use has changed completely since then. The technology has not.
A team of ten on a 40 Mbps FTTC connection with an 8 Mbps upload, all in cloud applications simultaneously, will experience exactly the kind of frustrating slowness and dropping calls that most businesses simply accept as normal. It is not normal. It is a capacity problem with a straightforward solution.
What the alternatives actually look like
FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) is genuine full fibre. The optical connection runs all the way to the building without any copper in the last section. Speeds are significantly higher and, more importantly, far more consistent. Availability varies by location, but FTTP is now accessible to the majority of UK business addresses following Openreach's rollout programme.
SOGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) delivers broadband connectivity without requiring a standard voice line. For businesses that have already moved their telephony to VoIP or hosted voice, it removes the cost of maintaining a line purely to carry the broadband signal.
A leased line is a dedicated, uncontended connection. The bandwidth is yours and is not shared with neighbouring businesses or households. A 100 Mbps leased line delivers 100 Mbps at 8am on a Monday morning, reliably, with a guaranteed uptime SLA and an engineer response commitment if it fails. For businesses where connectivity failure means direct revenue loss, it pays for itself.
The conversation your current IT provider probably has not had with you
The reason so many businesses are on the wrong connection is not complicated. Buying broadband through a standard ISP comparison site involves no assessment of actual need. You answer a few questions, pick a package, and someone posts a router.
A managed IT provider worth their name will look at your actual usage, the number of concurrent users, the applications you rely on, the consequences of an outage, and your growth plans, and then make a recommendation based on those factors, not on what is cheapest to sell.
If you have never had that conversation, it is worth having now.
IT Works provides connectivity assessments for businesses across the UK, covering everything from basic broadband suitability reviews to full network infrastructure design. We work across FTTC, FTTP, SOGEA, leased lines, satellite broadband, and mobile broadband solutions, matching the right connection type to the actual demands of the business.
If your internet connection has gone down in the last twelve months, if your team regularly complains about call quality or slow uploads, or if you genuinely do not know what type of connection your business is running on, that conversation is long overdue.
Contact IT Works: enquiries@it-works.co.uk | 0121 270 0808 | itworks.co.uk