Express Telephony

Griffin Internet, based at Pride Park in Derby, has been acknowledged as one of the fast-growing technology companies in the UK.

The company, which doubled its sales between 2003 and 2004 and doubled its staff during the last six months, has been ranked 64 in The Sunday Times Microsoft

Tech Track 100, an annual listing that ranks the UK’s fastest growing unquoted technology companies based on increases in sales.

“The naming of Griffin Internet as one of the UK’s leading technology organisations is great news for the company and for the people who work here, as it is their drive and commitment to our customers that have made it possible,” said Griffin Managing Director John Dawson.

“It is also good news for the business community of Derby and the East Midlands because it independently confirms what we have been saying ourselves:– businesses in this region have a local source for world-class, benefits-driven communications to guide them through all the new technology currently appearing in the market place.

“There’s no doubt that the new BT network and the explosion in the use of mobile communication devices is radically changing how business works. Our whole ethos is to make sure that our customers – either directly or through our resellers – need not worry about IT; they can concentrate on what they do best and leave us to provide them with what we do best.”

Griffin provides Internet access and is a major UK supplier of wholesale services for ISPs (Internet service providers) and telecoms operators, including some of the world’s largest (and smallest) companies. Latest advances have seen the company offering new Broadband services and an innovative storage area network (SAN) solution to allay the business community’s concerns about today’s communications security. The company is currently trialling new voice-over-IP services.

“There’s no doubt that the new BT network and the explosion in the use of mobile communication devices is radically changing how business works. Our whole ethos is to make sure that our customers – either directly or through our resellers – need not worry about IT; they can concentrate on what they do best and leave us to provide them with what we do best.”

EXPRESS TELEPHONY LAUNCH ONLINE DATA BACKUP SOLUTION

For many years Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) have offered the ability for SMEs to back-up their data over broadband to a central storage facility but only recently has this really taken off. So what’s changed? Andrew Dickinson, Sales and Marketing Director at Griffin Internet one of our Broadband wholesale partners, investigates Online Backup and the potential benefits to resellers and their customers.

Express Telephony in conjunction with Griffin Information Systems will supply their ExpressBackup product to anyone needing a reliable backup solution. This will provide a fully resilent off site supported backup solution that conforms to all disaster recovery regulations and for a little over £7.00 per month for up to 25gb of data it’s great value and offers peace of mind in event your systems crash and you need your data in a hurry!

Andrew Dickinson Wrote Recently; 

Ever over-written a document by mistake because you forgot to save with a different name; worked all night on a presentation only to find the file corrupt as you stand up to speak; lost a laptop or had critical files deleted by mistake? The traditional protection against data loss was to make a daily copy of data and store it off-site or in a fireproof safe. However the need for real-time, hassle free back-up and guaranteed instant restoration has made this approach virtually redundant.

Online back-up has been around for years but it has been too difficult for the end user to install and use, too expensive to go mass market but not expensive enough for resellers to justify putting a lot of resource behind it. Most importantly resellers have had to sell it whereas what they need is for their customers to buy it – preferably ‘off-the-page’.

Generic advertising by multinationals like BT has helped encourage the ‘pull’ demand from SMEs and some of the better ISPs have developed products designed to be sold through the channel. The best of these work in any environment, need no specialist hardware or complicated set-up routine and operate in the background without the user having to do anything. The end user should be able to easily restore individual documents or entire files without having to have in-house IT expertise or needing to call their service provider.

As we approach broadband saturation in the UK SME market, run-rate has slowed, margins have shrunk and competition is fierce with suppliers trying to steal customers from each other. 

So what should you be looking for in selecting your supplier of online backup?

• The right price; For just £7.00 per month it has to be pitched at a competitive price that is affordable.
• Financially and technically secure. If you are going to trust your data to a third party they need to be offering 100% reliability and have a strong balance sheet.
• It needs to be easy to buy set-up and manage.
• SOURCE: Andrew Dickinson – Griffin information Systems Limited & Comms Dealer July 2009

For more information on the best backup solution for your data contact martin@expresstelephony.co.uk

SYMMETRIC ASSURED BROADBAND  – Service Description – Engineered Broadband Symmetric Assured (EB SA): EXPRESSBroadband EB SA is a managed broadband service with a symmetric Assured (EB SA) upload and download speed targeted at the Hosted SIP trunk voice service market as it comes with a basic service level agreement providing some much needed gurantee of service and designed to replace SDSL services.

 The EXPRESSBroadband EB SA service comes in four product types and will be available for use from begining of March 2009. Prices are as follows:

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA 200 – £49.99 monthly

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA 500 – £99.99 monthly

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA 1000 – £135.00 monthly

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA 2000 – £159.99 monthly

Connection fee is £100.00 plus a suitable router such as the Zoom X6 at £120.00 configured.

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA services guarantee symmetric, 1:1 contended bandwidth, end to end, allowing the end user to plan usage for high priority applications such as voice and

video. Latency, packet loss and jitter are all guaranteed to remain above a

minimum limit giving assured levels of service quality.

The services above 500k are delivered over LLU based ADSL2+ Annex M,

prioritised and capped to offer the best possible service. Designed to replace SDSL

lines EXPRESSBroadband EB SA will soon become our preferred solution. The 200k solution is built on a fixed rate ADSL1 service for maximum resilience and minimum rate

adaption, perfect for single line voice circuits and we are aiming this product range at our Express Telephony system market.

The traffic is prioritised both in the carrier’s network, and across our own using QoS

functionality on our Edge routing platform. EB SA traffic will be prioritised over all other

traffic in our network, and we have made provision to accommodate this in our

connections with the carrier.

Product Options:

EXPRESSBroadband EB-SA 200

Download – 200Kb/s rate adaptive

Upload – 200Kb/s

EXPRESSBroadband EB-SA 500*

Download – 512Kb/s fixed

Upload – 512Kb/s

EXPRESSBroadband EB-SA 1000*

Download – 1024Kb/s fixed

Upload – 1024Kb/s

EXPRESSBroadband EB-SA 2000*

Download – 2048Kb/s fixed

Upload – 2048Kb/s

Service Levels – Enhanced Care

EXPRESSBroadband EB SA comes as standard with enhanced care, offering a 24 hour clear guarantee on all reported faults. Full details are available and will be published on this website when we go live with this product range. Below are some of the conditions for the support we expect to be able to provide.

Performance

Latency < 50ms

Jitter < ± 25ms

Packet Loss < 1%

Percentage figures are gathered over a 5 minute period and any customer experience

not meeting these service levels will be regarded as fault and reported as such. Faults

can, and will, be reported should the line be performing within these parameters, but in

our reasonable opinion, not performing to an acceptable level.

More information and a full web page will be available shortly.

Express Telephony will also be re structuring our products pages on broadband services and other connectivity products in the not to distand future to help explain the now ever growing range of Broadband services we can now offer.