EFM – Better than Broadband, By A Mile

Not so long ago, Internet Leased lines and private data circuits were exclusively used by the UK’s biggest corporate firms, but now any business can get first class data communications without the first class price tag.

Before broadband, we had three options.

There was the good old snail’s pace “dial-up” 56k modem connected to a telephone line, and it costed us a phone call all the time we were connected. A bit more cash could get you a digital ISDN line, bumping up the bandwidth to a heady 128kbps, and you’d be really flying.

The last one was for the big boys. A “Leased Line” was (still is) a dedicated, always-on connection and you decided on the speed. Still available today, “Kilostream” leased lines range between 128 and 512 kb/s. “Megastreams” are even faster, usually 2MB/s but speeds of 100MB/s are not unheard of. The costs are not for the feint-hearted either. A 2MB/s megastream connecting offices in London and Birmingham still costs upwards of £10,000.00 per year.

Kilostreams and Megastreams could (still can) be used for internet connections, and before broadband were the only option if you wanted to go faster than 128kbps. Problem was: eyewatering costs.

Broadband changed things. Rubbish bins quickly filled with old modems as businesses big and small jumped on the broadbandwagon, surfing the internet at amazing speeds and starting an online revolution. Many firms ditched expensive Kilostreams in favour of “Virtual Private Networks”. A “VPN” consisted of a broadband at each office, linked via the internet and protected from the hackers with software to make a secure VPN “Tunnel”. VPNs quickly became one of the most popular and cost-effective ways for a business to join it’s computers together.

Home workers joined the party, using “VPN Client” software to link to the office network from their living rooms.

The problem with Broadband is that almost everyone uses ADSL. The “A” stands for Asynchronous, ie. you download faster than you upload. You receive faster than you send. For instance, a typical 2MB/s ADSL has a download speed of 2MB/s, but only has an upload speed of 128 kb/s, a whole lot slower. So ADSL is fine for surfing the net, and it’s slow sending speed rarely affects your email messaging.

There’s more. ADSL “Contention” means that you share your broadband with your neighbours, sometimes as many as fifty of them (50:1 contention) if you go for cheap and cheerful. 2MB/s into fifty gives a snail’s-pace 40 kb/s, so most IT managers beg for low-contention broadband, but even 5:1 contended isn’t brilliant. Upload speeds also suffer, as you’d expect. VPN Tunnels often don’t work quite as well as they should, and in the early days contention forced firms to put their Kilostreams back in.

SDSL is cheaper than Kilostreams and is an improvement (“S” standing for Synchronous), with speeds usually around 1 or 2MB/s, but contention is still a nuisance.

At Last, EFM

Ethernet First Mile (EFM) does pretty much exactly what it says. You get a direct Ethernet connection from the local exchange to your offices. It isn’t shared, so there’s no contention. Plus, it’s synchronous. Better still, you can get up to 20MB/s of bandwidth. So, you can have a secure VPN between offices that actually works, at speeds the same as or better than Megastreams, at a fraction of the cost.

And the icing on the cake: Your EFM connection can also be used as your internet access, meaning that surfing has never been faster.

EFM is now widely available on most local exchanges, and is now a welcome alternative to ADSL, SDSL and Bonded DSL connections.

Southern Communications are an EFM Leased Lines provider. Call us on 0845 051 1122 or visit http://www.leased-lines.org/ for a free EFM survey.
For details on our range of Business Broadband services, please visit http://www.southern-comms.co.uk/broadband/
Established since 1965, we have been providing complete business telecoms solutions including telephone systems, business calls, phone lines and business mobiles.