Choosing a connectivity provider
Price and advertised speed are the easy comparisons. The harder questions are the ones that matter when a link actually fails.
Most businesses choose an internet or connectivity provider the way they would choose a home fibre package: price per Mbps, contract length, maybe a review site’s star rating. That is a reasonable way to pick a provider for streaming video. It is the wrong way to pick one for a business that stops trading when the link drops – the criteria that matter shift from how fast to how it fails.
Three questions are worth asking before any promotional pricing. What does the SLA actually guarantee, and what happens – credit, penalty, or nothing – when it is missed? Is there a genuinely diverse failover path, a second link on different infrastructure rather than a second cable from the same duct, or does one dig crew take the whole site down? And when something breaks outside office hours, is the response measured in minutes or in “next business day”?
A single ISP relationship, however good, is still a single point of failure and a single perspective on what "good" looks like. Enterprise Networking and Network & Security Consulting exist to sit above that: connectivity designed to stay up on its worst day, monitored and managed rather than left to run itself, and evaluated independently of any single provider’s sales pitch.
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