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Admin14 Apr 2014 18:29

Buy Bandwidth - Top 5 tips to buy bandwidth

Buying bandwidth is a very big decision, your business, productivity, reliability and most importantly customer satisfaction depends on your network uptime. Here are top 5 tips to buy bandwidth; these are very useful when you are planning to buy domestic or international bandwidth.

1. Feasibility
2. Topology
3. SLA (service level agreement)
4. Escalation Matrix
5. Service assurance.

1. Feasibility

Get the feasibility done for your complete address including the last mile. Most of the buildings are connected with optical fiber cables these days, to avoid any surprises of last mile handover issues make sure you have fiber feasibility on your site address.

Points to consider:

1. On-net feasibility, generally means that address you want to connect is on the network of your service provider, which is the ideal situation.
2. Off-net feasibility, generally means that your address you want to connect is not on the network of your service provider and there is third party network involvement to complete the connectivity.
3. Even in cases of On-net feasibility, you might want to check the available capacity like E1, T1, DS3, and STM-1 or above.

2. Topology

Ensure that you have network topology diagram; this information helps you to determine the redundancy options for your site.  Most of the telecom service providers provision ring protection to their network. 

Make sure that you have end-to-end ring protection; even a single point of failure could lead to long outage.

3. SLA (Service Level Agreement)

SLA is very important document explaining terms and conditions of services offered to you by your bandwidth provider. You can request SLA copy to make sure that it collaborates everything you have agreed with your account manager. It provides you all desired information of ring protection, latency, uptime and outage process etc.

4. Escalation Matrix

Escalation matrix is the hierarchy of contacts, which you can contact at the time of any unplanned outage or down time. Most telecoms companies have established process of informing customers if there is any downtime.  You don’t want to just rely upon your account manager for any urgent requirements, it’s always better to ask for en escalation matrix so that you have all the contacts handy to use when needed.  

5. Service Assurance

Service Assurance team takes care of your circuits or capacity routes once you have tested and accepted the bandwidth. Now, this team will be your point of contact to address any issues you might have with your bandwidth. It is always advised to initiate a discussion and know these people well in advance.

In a nutshell, buying bandwidth sounds like a cumbersome process but you can make it easy if you don’t miss any of the tips. Get the feasibility done, make sure your address is on-net and there is capacity available, check for the ring protection, ensure you have a copy of SLA, escalation matrix and know your service assurance team well in advance before you send a purchase order.