The major Sports Events of the summer may be over, but how well did your internet connection cope with the increase in traffic during the World Cup or Wimbledon?

Impact on the Fusion network was minimal, if at all. The entire design and concept of the network allowing a massive amount of overhead resilience that creates a vast ceiling of available bandwidth to manage any peaks.

However, for the end user, the pure bandwidth available on the Fusion network is only part of the story.

Contention can unfortunately play a part long before your connection hits the ISP’s network. If you have a contended “up to” service, you will by definition be sharing your available bandwidth with multiple other users. When traffic is quiet (i.e. the middle of the night), you should get close to your maximum available data rate (dependent upon your copper line quality and distance from the exchange).

At peak times, and especially “peak peak” times such as the World Cup, you will join a very long queue of users (businesses and possibly residential customers) all fighting for a slice of bandwidth.

This contention is down to BT’s equipment at exchange level, usually before handoff to the ISP (although many residential ISPs will then contend the services further on their own network). This reality is that this is the only way ISP’s (via BT) can provide extremely cheap DSL services, and the cost you pay per month is really the main indicator as to how contended your line really is. If you are paying £5or £10 a month for service, your bandwidth has to be shared between multiple users for the ISP to make a profit.

Thankfully, Fusion offers a choice of credible alternatives. If budget only allows for a standard ADSL connection, we do not “re-contend” on our own network once BT hands off to us, meaning you get the full corporate-class bandwidth that all our clients enjoy.

However, our main speciality area is fully uncontended connectivity, offering guaranteed bandwidth from 512Kb to 1Gb (or more!)

Contact Fusion account managers to discuss available options to upgrade your current connection.

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