* BellSouth on how customers decide between high-speed DSL and low-speed alternatives
In continuing our discussion of how one goes about deciding between high-speed DSL and low-speed (a.k.a. mid-band) metro Ethernet, we called for responses from both users and service providers.
Recently, we shared some thoughts from a user, and now we’re providing a response from BellSouth. The service provider said: “At BellSouth we believe the choice to purchase DSL or mid-band Ethernet as an access method should be driven by the customer’s needs. After all, both DSL and BellSouth’s metro Ethernet services have a similar penetration rate of around 80% of the business market.
“But to fully answer the question of what is best for the customer you need to ask them, ‘What do you need to do with your data and how critical is it to you?’
“For example if you need to send a large file from one site to another and can’t wait, you’ll need a service with performance guarantees, a symmetric service with service-level agreements (SLA) from the provider such as BellSouth’s Metro Ethernet Service. You pay more, and you get more, like guaranteed time to repair if there is a service outage, as well as latency commitments and network availability. These are the things you need when your data positively, absolutely has to get through.
“A call center that depends on Internet orders from their customers would never buy an access service that didn’t have performance guarantees. While this customer may be on the critical end of the spectrum as far as data needs, there are plenty of others that now primarily rely on real time quality data such as banks, hospitals, schools, etc.
“If data receipt and delivery is important to all customers, then who might buy DSL over a mid-band Ethernet service? Those customers may not have the need for consistent upstream and downstream bandwidth and a best effort service works for them. This customer may have a work at home application, irregular or sporadic data usage during the day and be able to transmit data at non-peak times. This customer may also be more sensitive to the price of the service and as a trade off may be willing to tolerate minimal downtime and/or longer repair times. For this customer, DSL access may be the appropriate fit.
“So to sum all this up, the purchase of one over the other is driven by the customer, and speed, reliability, network performance and price all play into the decision.
“If price is the overall driver of the customer’s decision, DSL will win out most every time as business DSL prices range from $50 to $110 per month with mid-band Ethernet ranging from $360 to $800.
“At BellSouth we feel it’s not a debate, it’s a well thought-out decision based on customer needs.”
Many thanks to BellSouth for sharing these thoughts and we’re looking forward to continuing to hear from you on this issue.
