The hidden practices used by Internet providers that can impact your business.
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This guide is intended to highlight factors that are often overlooked when choosing an Internet provider, and help you ask better questions when buying to make an informed decision, not based only on headline speed and price.
Bandwidth (the Mbps or Gbps) matters, but it isn’t the only factor that determines performance.
Latency is the time it takes for data to travel to a server and back, and it has a direct impact on how responsive your connection feels.
It is particularly noticeable for digital voice, video calls and livestreams (which with poor latency will lag or regularly buffer), but it can also affect how quickly cloud apps respond, the snappiness of everyday browsing, and the overall time taken to transfer large files.
Low latency networks require careful network design and ongoing optimisation so traffic can take the fastest paths. Budget and residentially-focused providers often don't prioritise this, for cost savings.
Before you sign up, look beyond the advertised speeds; ask an ISP how it optimises routes and reduces latency, and if their salespeople don't know the answer or any specifics, that's probably a sign that quality bandwidth has never been a priority for them.
An ISP’s choice of carrier partners, and the breadth of its interconnections, both affect latency. With only a limited number of carriers, traffic may be forced onto slower or more congested routes. A wider range of carriers provides more routing options, and some will perform better to certain destinations than others.
Enlink partners with the world’s top five global carriers, alongside extensive interconnection within London for more efficient routing.
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A gym might sell 1,000 memberships, but it doesn’t buy 1,000 treadmills. Why? Because not everyone turns up to use the facilities at the exact same time.
Broadband providers work in a similar way, oversubscribing their networks to keep prices low. Technically, this is known as the contention ratio, where the available fibre capacity is shared several times over between multiple local businesses and homes.
Adding more customers to a single fibre reduces cost per user and increases margin, but weakens performance guarantees.The effects are most noticeable at peak times, and performance can gradually degrade over time as more subscribers are added, even though the advertised headline speeds remain unchanged. This is the nature of broadband, as opposed to leased line services which are dedicated and fully guaranteed.
When choosing an ISP, look for clear bandwidth availability guarantees given upfront at the point of sale and written into the contract, along with the remedies available if those guarantees are not met. A network designed primarily for residential users, with business services added as an afterthought, will typically be highly contended and optimised for cost rather than performance.
Enlink is a business only network, focused on performance. Every broadband connection we install comes with a 100% minimum bandwidth guarantee, with no reduction at peak times.Some circuits also include a burst option, allowing you to use more bandwidth when capacity is available.
For sites with heavier usage, higher security or compliance requirements, or where uptime is critical, Enlink recommends a dedicated leased line.
Our aim is to over-deliver on our promises and make delighted customers.
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Large companies often use call centres outsourced to third party companies, whether based in the UK or abroad. Not only does this mean sharing all your account data with unknown agents (potentially in a distant land), but it also introduces barriers of knowledge, language and processes which can be extremely frustrating.
Outsourced agents usually follow strict scripts and troubleshooting flows set by their ISP clients.Their job is to triage common issues before escalating anything complex.
Because call centre agents don’t design or operate the underlying network, they have limited authority and technical visibility, leading to repetitive questions, delays, and a feeling that you’re going in circles.
In business, downtime can be crippling. Even wasting time on hold, or running through the same old “have you tried rebooting” scripts, can be exhausting. Look for a provider that prioritises customer service from first contact through to in-life problems. It's not so common!
Not only do we avoid outsourcing support to overseas or third-party call centres, we don’t operate a traditional call centre model at all. Instead, support is delivered by our in-house engineering team, keeping things direct, knowledgeable and accountable.
Each client is assigned a dedicated account manager who gets to know their business and setup, and when support is needed, they speak straight to the engineers who run the network.
Premium and Managed by Enlink customers also have access to director-level escalation, giving complete peace of mind that should an issue not be handled well for any reason, there is a direct path to get the problem addressed efficiently at the highest level.
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Many Internet providers choose to limit their responsibility to where the cable enters your building.They install the line, confirm it’s working, maybe provide a basic router. Beyond that much of the responsibility shifts to the customer: network design, Wi-Fi coverage, router configuration, security settings and internal cabling are left for the business to figure out.
That separation of responsibilities can cause frustrations during the lifetime of the service, where blame is passed around for performance issues (e.g. "the Wi-Fi is slow"), rather than anyone taking ownership to resolve the problem promptly.
Think about the whole network, not just the Internet line, and how you’d like to be supported as a business. Ask your ISP exactly where their responsibility ends, and what happens if the problem turns out to be inside your building.
At Enlink, customer service sits at the heart of everything we do. Because every business has different needs, we offer a range of support options, from a simple “wires only” service through to a fully managed end-to-end service, right up to the connection with your devices, for complete peace of mind. With our Managed by Enlink™ service, we design, procure, configure, install and maintain the network equipment best suited to your business, ensuring it remains secure, optimised and fully supported.
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As more businesses, particularly newer and smaller ones, embrace flexible and mobile ways of working, 5G Internet has become increasingly popular. It promises fast speeds to support more users.
5G allows businesses to operate from any area with a good signal strength, and can deliver speeds that rival the slower end of the fibre market, often up to 200 Mbps. However, keep in mind that mobile data connections offer far fewer guarantees than fixed lines: latency is typically higher and much more variable, repair times for failed masts can be weeks or longer (without any guarantees), and performance will vary depending on signal strength, location and network congestion.
Also, many mobile broadband packages are marketed as “unlimited”, but in reality are subject to fair-use policies in the small print, where heavy users (typically above 500GB per month) may experience reduced speeds or lower priority during busy periods, or even be charged for the excess usage. The policies can explicitly prohibit the use of the service in a Wi-Fi router or via tethering, making it unsuitable for use in a business environment.
If your business regularly handles large amounts of data, or may need to in an emergency such as restoring a cloud backup, it’s worth considering whether mobile data is the right choice as a primary connection. In many cases it’s better suited as a last-resort backup for critical business tasks, rather than the primary line.
As part of a wider ethos of not being misleading, our mobile (4G and 5G) broadband contracts have clearly stated monthly data caps. We provide you honest advice as to whether mobile broadband is a good fit for your business needs, and don't hide limits in the small print to become a nasty surprise later. We're network agnostic, so can perform an on-site survey to determine the coverage and typical speeds of all available networks in your area - selecting the best performing and giving you an indication of real-world performance - so you aren't buying into a service which disappoints from the start.
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Most broadband packages include a basic router, but these are rarely designed with business environments in mind. Many organisations already have their own equipment, or need features and flexibility that entry-level devices simply don’t provide.
Business networks often require properly configurable firewalls, site to site or remote access VPNs, VLANs to securely segment the network, and better monitoring and traffic control. These capabilities are often missing from free routers, or only available in a very limited form.
Especially if your business uses Wi-Fi
As broadband speeds have increased, it’s often the wireless network inside the building that becomes the bottleneck rather than the Internet connection from outside. A single bundled router rarely provides reliable coverage across an entire workplace, and many businesses need multiple access points along with secure isolated networks for staff and guests.
For these reasons, many organisations prefer to use dedicated networking equipment designed for business use. It also avoids unnecessary e-waste when perfectly good hardware is already in place.
At Enlink, we don’t include a router as standard. Instead we select the best system to match your specific requirements for performance, coverage and functionality, or alternatively work with you (or your IT support) to ensure you’ve got all the details you need to configure your own.
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We know your time is valuable, so this isn’t a sales pitch. Just a short conversation about your current setup to see whether there might be ways we could add value.
If it turns out we’re not the right fit, that’s absolutely fine, we won’t pester you! Either way, as a thank you for your time, we’ll donate £10 to ABC Book Club.
To browse more articles on Internet and networking technology, browse our Enlink Academy articles or YouTube shorts.
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