Thinking of switching your broadband provider? With superfast fibre being rolled out across the country, many businesses are looking for the best new deals, and this will often mean moving to a different ISP. Even if you’re not looking to go superfast, you can often save money by switching – so why wouldn’t you? Switching is easy, isn’t it?
Well, that’s what the telecoms companies would have you believe. Unfortunately, the sales representatives from these companies are not well-versed in the technical side of things. Their job is to sell you a broadband package and get an engineer to take over your service. Usually, this is a fairly simple process – especially for a home user. However, if you’re running a business and you have a sophisticated IT and telecoms infrastructure in place, switching your broadband could cause all kinds of problems.
The problem is down time. If you’re running a business, being without access to the internet for any period of time will lose you money. Now, most ISPs aren’t going to have engineers working during the weekend, so it’s likely they’ll give you a switchover date that falls within the working week. That’s okay, though – because that switchover only takes an hour or so…
Except when it doesn’t. You’re not being lied to – your ISP reps aren’t deliberately trying to deceive you – but what you have to remember is they don’t know anything about your company’s IT setup. It may be that your systems only accept a connection from an expected IP, and some on-site work needs to be carried out to enable the switchover. For this to happen, your new ISP will have to provide your IT provider with certain information.
Here at Saqqara, we’ve even had a situation where a client signed up with a new provider, the new ISP didn’t specify a switchover date for our client. The internet went down a few weeks later, and until we were on-site and able to diagnose the problem for them, people wrongly assumed it was an internal IT issue. We had to install a new router and reconfigure their remote IT systems Taking this into account, as well as the time they were without internet access, this cost-saving exercise turned into an expensive mistake.
Don’t let this happen to you; if you’re thinking of switching broadband providers, your first step should always be to talk to your IT support. We’re here to help, contact us today.