Sky Business believes resellers can steal a march on competitors by offering customers competitively priced high capacity Ethernet services in advance of a surge in bandwidth demands.
Speaking at a partner round table event held in London, Sales Director Nick Powell said the channel should take advantage of high bandwidth options and large backhaul capabilities without delay.
“The dynamics of bandwidth utilisation demand are going up and it isn’t going to stop,” he said. “If a business customer is growing and upgrading connectivity requirements regularly or wants no constraints, partners can provide a future-proof solution at a good price today, giving them a sticky customer who has an upgrade path in place.
“And I would ask partners to question whether their current carrier has got the backhaul capability to support growth.”
Powell’s comments were predicated on research commissioned by Sky Business and carried out by telecoms consultant Cartesian, based on hour long interviews with c-level directors in the channel. Questions were focused on business data connectivity trends, the last mile wholesale market and the support channel partners need from a network provider.
The report was discussed at the round table attended by senior representatives from channel heavyweights including Digital Wholesale Solutions, Exponential-e, Mar-stons Telecoms, CityFibre and Openreach. With the cost of much demanded 1Gbps lines decreasing, it was established that price was not a key issue for channel partners. More important was a national footprint, a robust last mile infrastructure, good network design, backhaul capacity, network resilience, service delivery, a strong commercial partnership and a product roadmap.
‘Ease of doing business’ and ‘keeping things simple’ were quoted as key elements, with APIs and portals crucial to the delivery of a quality service. The need for Openreach to use consistent terminology when communicating with customers was also flagged up as a major industry requirement.