Fibre solution for a small mall based business

[LazyLion]

What do you guys think of this quote?

This is for an Optometrist's business in the New Mall of the South.

There will be three small office computers and two tablets running off this fibre connection.

The price looks good (I think this is on the Vodacom backbone).

Is 8 Mbps on fibre enough for a business?

 

[rorz0r]

Seems like overkill to me but the price doesn't seem bad if it's uncapped.

 

[LazyLion]

Seems like overkill to me but the price doesn't seem bad if it's uncapped.

Why do you say it is overkill? Because of the speed? Should she opt for a lower speed?
I think the starting package is 3 mbps.

 

[rorz0r]

Well what will the link be used for besides browsing some Facebook and responding to emails etc?

 

[LazyLion]

Well what will the link be used for besides browsing some Facebook and responding to emails etc?

The Optometrist branch will run the usual Optimed software which will back up to the cloud.
Customers will use the tablets to fill out application forms and questionnaires in order to book appointments and choose frames.
The three desktop computers will be used for e-mail and Office 365 which will also save to the cloud.
All other documents will be shared on Evernote.

 

[Mars]

I also think its a little more than you need. Would it be possible to start on a lower speed and then upgrade it later if you need to?

What applications would she run that need live connections to offsite servers? Do the tablets connect to a local DB or offsite? To backup to the could you dont really need speed since its a background process so it doesn't matter if it takes 5 seconds or 30 seconds, but if you have to wait for a response from a server then you would want speed. Even then 4 mg would be way sufficient.

At one stage in my business I hosted my POS DB in a separate location and used a vpn over two 4mg adsl lines to connect the client to the server. That technically means I was running it over a 0.4Mbps vpn since I was limited by the max upload on either side.
It was a little too slow for my liking but it worked overall. The only reason I changed it was because of constant adsl downtime.

So since fibre has and up and down of the same speed you would be having 4Mbps up and down and that would be way fast enough. Faster is always nicer tho, and that price is decent for that speed if its uncapped.

 

[dotVIBE]

I'm not so sure. If it was a business fibre product, then 8Mbps uncapped at R1940.00 p/m would be good.

The pricing specifies broadband fibre though, meaning it's likely to be a contended product. Unless we know what the contention ratio and the SLA and FUP specifications are, it's impossible to say whether the pricing is decent or not. Try to find out what the fine print says first.