Low Cost Leased Lines for Business
EFM is a new low cost leased line service which fills the gap between cheap unreliable broadband and expensive fibre leased lines. Businesses can now take advantage of a cost effective, symmetrical and un-contended Internet connectivity service which delivers a guaranteed service level, which has never been available before to the SME (Small Medium Enterprise) market in UK.
Businesses have been waiting for a while for a service like this because broadband services like SDSL and newer broadband technologies like FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) are just not reliable enough for the modern business that needs a guaranteed level of symmetrical bandwidth to run more and more Internet based applications. EFM is a solid and reliable business class Internet connectivity service which is set for rapid growth over the coming years.
UK Service Availability
EFM is now widely available across the UK. With thousands of local telephone exchanges in the UK now EFM enabled, most businesses that are within 3km of most town and city centres will be able to take advantage of this new cutting edge and cost-effective connectivity service.
EFM is still being rolled out across the UK, which may mean that some premises will not yet be able to take advantage of EFM. However, that may change in the near future as more and more local telephone exchanges are upgraded to support EFM.
For Single-site or Multi-site (private WAN) connectivity
EFM is not just about connectivity to the Internet, you can also use EFM as a way of connecting multiple sites as another access option, in addition to fibre and broadband. If you are looking to deploy a multi-site private WAN (wide area network) connecting several sites, EFM can be deployed, along with business broadband and fibre based services, as part of a private layer 2 wide area network, which are considered to be faster and more secure than layer 3 wide area networks.
It might be that for some smaller sites, EFM is not justified and that a business broadband service may be suitable. Likewise it may be the case that for some sites, higher bandwidth speeds are required, in which case Ethernet over fibre might be preferable.
EFM is, like Ethernet over Fibre, a Carrier Ethernet service offering excellent prices per megabit compared to traditional leased line. But it’s not just the price per megabit that makes Carrier Ethernet (EFM and Ethernet over Fibre) an attractive solution for businesses needing very high bandwidth connectivity. It is possible to assign different QoS (Quality of service) settings to your traffic, effectively enabling you to prioritise various services (like VoIP, data and video) over a single Ethernet connection. This aggregation of services over a single Carrier Ethernet platform makes large scale complex WAN (Wide Area Network) deployments easier to manage and more cost-effective to deploy.
All we need to start off with is the postcodes of each site to be connected and the approximate bandwidth required to each site, and we’ll be able to send you a proposal.
In-Built Resilience
EFM is delivered on two or four pairs of copper wires combined to create a single synchronous Ethernet connection that delivers fast and dedicated connectivity with inherent high reliability. Because EFM is delivered across multiple bonded copper pairs, if one of the pairs was to fail, the other pairs are still able to provide connectivity. If there was to be a fault on any of the copper pairs, EFM does not drop the service.
The resilient architecture for EFM delivery keeps the service live at a reduced speed until the problem is fixed, ensuring your business is still connected. If an outage does occur, businesses are covered by a service level agreement which guarantees that resolution will be achieved in a six hour window.