21 CN is Here
21 CN the 21st Century Networking from BT is finally here in Edinburgh, well the Waverley exchange anyway. The upgrade took place over a month ago and while most of our clients at that exchange were cutoff for 25 hours, they now have a faster and cheaper service.
Looking back over ADSL in the last 10 years thingd have come on a lot. The fist generation of broadband with 1/2, 1 or 2Mb connections and an unlimited cap seem such a long time ago. While all of our clients migrated from this service years ago there are still a lot of businesses out ther still using this service.
The second generation was to a usage based model. All lines get the maximum available speed and you pay for the consumption on the line. This works very well for the very high and very low users, but can catch those with varying usage. The is no such thing as unlimited usage, either you have a non-commercial tarrif whereby after 30Gb you get a nasty letter and a threat to disconection, or you pay for what you use. We have clients on 3-400Gb of usage per month and EntaNet are quite happy to supply them.
The 21CN network options are a more advance version of the existing speeds and costs. The new pricing structure is based on the concept of top-ups and limits. You choose a tarrif and if you go over it your speed drops for a Gb before you get cut off, this gives you a chance to react and purchase a top-up. Along with this are higher upload and download speeds – one client are getting 1Mb upload and 10Mb download for less than they were paying under the old scheme with a higher usage cap. We are also seeing that the business tarrifs are so much smoother for business customers who previously considered cutting costs and running on a domestic speed range.
