“But Aren’t all Internet Service Providers essentially the same?”

“But Aren’t all Internet Service Providers essentially the same?”

I must have been asked this question (or a variant of it) hundreds of times over the past twenty years, and I was asked it again at a meeting last Friday.

Of course, as Co-Founder of an Internet Service Provider (ISP), it is not surprising that my answer is a huge resounding NO!

If I go back to the late 90’s when I accepted these questions much more so. The internet was new (relatively), at least to many businesses. Many out there saw it as nothing more than a fad, and therefore didn’t waste time investigating it that much.

Then as the early to mid-00’s came and went, the internet started being taken much more seriously, by educators, businesses of all sizes, and governments.

Now almost two decades on, with so many of us dependent on the internet for so many aspects of our daily lives, online shopping, disaster recovery, telephony, video streaming services, ATM’s, virtual assistants, smartphones, applications, and so much more, and the idea of us not having the internet is unimaginable and would be an alien world to so many born during the internet revolution.

But after twenty years of being asked the same question I am starting to ask myself, is it companies like mine that are to blame for that question not being answered or the information misunderstood, is it education, or is it the marketing of bigger companies that would like you to believe there are no differences?

The truth is, I suspect it is a little bit of all the above.

All ISP’s are different, they are run by different people, with a different ethos, using different technologies to run their networks, to different markets with different strategies. So of course, they are going to be different.

Over the past couple of decades, ISPs have diversified massively from what they were in the late 90’s, back when dial-up was the norm, and people used the internet for nothing much more than email or very slow web browsing.

Those ISP have grown up to cater to markets that make sense to them, or that they have their expertise in. For the clear majority that meant the home user, or residential market. Offering services coupled with TV or Telephony, the likes of which Virgin, BT and Sky all do very well. Over recent years their services have changed significantly to match their user base.

Then you have specialists like ourselves, Exa Networks, who cater only to the business and education / public sector communities, and don’t provide services at all to the residential side. So of course, our services went on a different path to the likes of Virgin, BT or Sky. A path where offering secure, fast, reliable services, with a priority around cutting edge technology and customer service. Not securing TV Rights to football matches or offering free movies and such like.

So just on a very cursory view, ISPs are very different, and that is before you really dig down into them.

Does it matter to your business or school, if it takes someone hours sat in a telephone queue waiting for support if your internet went down? Does it matter if sometimes, at peak periods, your internet is much slower than normal? Does it matter if you are using older, slower, less reliable technology, compared to something like our 10Gbps + DarkLight?

For some, including many of our thousands of customers, yes of course it matters, that’s why companies such as Exa exist and give a real option to customers; but for many, in particular, home users, it doesn’t. They simply want the fastest, cheapest service, that gives them the most perks for their monthly fee, and that is okay because let’s face it if your internet goes off at home for a day or two, it is going to be annoying, but you are not going to lose contracts. You are not going to have to send your staff home, and you are not going to have to tell customers that they are going to have to wait longer for their orders. You might have to just end up watching terrestrial TV instead of streaming something on Netflix or Amazon or updating your Facebook or Instagram feeds; then again you could always just do those things on a smartphone via mobile internet!

But does that, or should that matter, to the company, school or individual using the services in a professional situation? Would they even notice those differences in the normal course of their use of the internet?

Yes, it matters, it matters a lot, and yes those companies, schools, councils, should all very much care about who is providing their internet services, they should know the difference between the residential providers and the dedicated business providers. They should know the difference between real gigabit plus fibre products such as DarkLight, and hybrid products such as Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) used by the residential providers.

We did a short blog on this at Exa, which can be found here if you are interested. https://blog.exa.net.uk

The market is becoming very confused now, and that doesn’t help. In fact, the Advertising Standards Authority recently decided that it was fine to call something a fibre product, even if it wasn’t a fibre based product because it was a commonly used term! Thankfully, City Fibre, a company we work with all over the UK have now challenged that and are taking the ASA to the high court, and rightly so, it was a crazy decision.

The internet is already confusing enough for the public, without companies deliberately making it more so. Imagine if you turned up at an airport for a flight and they said they were using buses rather than planes to take you to your holiday destination. You would rightly complain, stating you had booked a flight, to which they said, well you are technically above the ground when you travel, which is like flying, and we will get you to the same destination, it’ll just take much longer! People wouldn’t stand for it, but because the internet is “techy” it's okay to mislead?

Then once we get that angle sorted, and definitions are correct, so Fibre is Fibre, and so on, then there is still a massive difference between the different products.

I won’t go too much into it here (maybe a future blog), but if you take our DarkLight service for instance, which we terminate to customers at 10Gbps. This means that at any time in the future you can turn this all the way up to 10Gbps if you needed it. The service is dedicated and not shared with any other fibre user. It is fibre just for your organisation. But then there are competitors only selling “similar” services, such as GPON, these are 8:1 shared, meaning you are not guaranteed to get the full speed you are buying, and there’s much more but that’s for another blog!

So, in summary, yes, all ISPs are very different, all products they sell are very different, and even what appears to be the same product can be very different, so if the internet is important to your organisation do your homework, ask for testimonials, and if the internet is important to your organisation, ring Exa Networks ??

There is a brilliant video here from one of our customers Kala Sangam, highlighting just why not all ISPs are the same.