JON HONEYBALL’S BUSINESS-CLASS BROADBAND

Second line and 4G fallbacks have their place, but homeworkers who are entirely dependent on a fast internet connection might want stronger guarantees. The standard service-level agreement (SLA) for an ADSL line is about a week, working Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm. So a line failure to your house could result in you being disconnected for many days. This is a pain in normal times, but in the new homeworking era that delay is not acceptable.

There are upgrades to the support you get, with BT TotalCare improving things to 24-hour support. Although most work will probably be done during

8am to 6pm, it does include weekends. You need to have TotalCare on both the ADSL connection and the voice line, and the cost is around £35 or so per month on top of your ADSL connection.

Or you can go for the high-end solution which is fibre-to-thepremises (FTTP) on a professional grade contract. I recently installed FTTP to my house, linking it to the lab some ten miles away. This gives me 1Gbit/sec in and out onto the main LAN and thence out to the internet itself.

With this, you get a four-hour response time with a 12-hour fix, available 24/7. However, if you want to go down this rabbit hole, you need deep pockets. The installation will run to quite a few thousand pounds, and the monthly connection fee is in the hundreds.

Is this justifiable for a domestic environment? Probably not. But if you need high-speed connectivity, especially to a secured business LAN, the figures start to make a lot more sense. And the repair time frame when something goes wrong is a lot better than “sometime in the next week, guv”.