Connectivity that never lets you down
Everything depends on your connection: calls, cloud, payments, email. We design and manage business-grade connectivity that keeps you online and running without interruptions, with support from people who actually answer the phone.
Connectivity is the one part of IT where the failure is total. A slow laptop is an annoyance; a dead line stops the card machine, the phones, the booking system and every cloud application at once. It is also the part most often bought on headline speed alone, which is how businesses end up on a consumer product with a consumer repair time.
Choosing the right line
The honest answer is that it depends on what breaks when you go down, and for how long you can stand it.
Business broadband, whether FTTC or full fibre, is a shared product. It is fast, it is inexpensive, and the contention and the repair times reflect that. For a small office where a few hours offline is survivable, it is the sensible choice, particularly with a second line or a 4G failover behind it.
A leased line is a dedicated circuit that nobody else shares. The bandwidth is guaranteed and symmetrical, which matters more than raw download speed once your systems are in the cloud and your phones run over the same connection. It comes with a genuine service level agreement and a repair commitment measured in hours rather than days. It costs considerably more, and for some businesses it is still cheaper than the downtime.
Most of the businesses we look after sit somewhere in between: a good fibre service with an automatic failover, so an outage becomes a slower morning rather than a lost day. We are carrier neutral, so the recommendation follows the requirement rather than the commission.
Then there is the part inside the building, which is where a surprising number of connectivity problems actually live. A fast line does nothing if the WiFi cannot reach the far end of the site, if the switch is a decade old, or if the cabling was run for a different floor plan.
Our Business Internet service includes:
- Business broadband with resilient backup options
- Leased lines dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth with SLAs
- WiFi and network installation designed, installed and managed
- Wireless solutions point-to-point links and site-wide coverage
- Remote working secure, fast access for your team from anywhere
- Failover and resilience a second line or 4G backup that switches over automatically
- Structured cabling and switching, so the network inside matches the line outside
- Voice-ready networks sized and prioritised so a phone system can run over the same connection
How an installation runs
Lines take time to deliver, and that is the part nobody warns you about. A leased line typically runs to 60 to 90 working days from order because it involves physical civil works. We plan around that rather than discovering it late.
- 1. Survey. We check what is actually available at your postcode, not what the marketing map claims, and look at the building: cabling, cabinet, power and where the equipment needs to live.
- 2. Design and quote. Line, failover, network hardware and telephony costed as one piece of work, with the trade-offs between options set out plainly.
- 3. Order and track. We place the order and chase the carrier. You get updates from us rather than having to sit in a queue to ask.
- 4. Install and cut over. Kit installed and tested with the old line still running. The switch happens out of hours, and the old service stays live until the new one has proven itself.
- 5. Monitor. The connection goes onto continuous monitoring, so an outage is usually something we are already working on when you notice it.
Uptime guarantees and service credits
We guarantee 99.99% network uptime, which allows for less than four and a half minutes of downtime in a month. Below that, service credits apply automatically on a sliding scale.
99.99% to 100%
- Downtime
- Less than 4.5 minutes
- Service credit
- None
99.9% to 99.99%
- Downtime
- 4.5 to 43.8 minutes
- Service credit
- 10% of monthly fee
99.5% to 99.9%
- Downtime
- 43.8 minutes to 3.65 hours
- Service credit
- 25% of monthly fee
99.0% to 99.5%
- Downtime
- 3.65 to 7.3 hours
- Service credit
- 50% of monthly fee
Below 99.0%
- Downtime
- More than 7.3 hours
- Service credit
- 100% of monthly fee
Response times and cover
A line being down is a critical-priority ticket, which carries a contractual 15-minute response guarantee. Hardware failures have their own commitments, including a two-hour replacement target on network interfaces and power supplies.
Monitoring runs continuously. Helpdesk hours are 08:30 to 17:30, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays, with 24/7 cover available where an outage outside those hours would genuinely stop the business.
What this looks like in practice
Two Kent businesses where the connection was the constraint: one rural, one multi-site.
Why choose CT1 for Business Internet?
- Carrier-neutral advice: the right line, not the biggest commission
- One partner for the connection, the network inside and the phones that run over it
- Proactive monitoring that spots outages before you do
- Local engineers across Canterbury and Kent
Get started today
Ask for a free connectivity review: we'll benchmark your current speeds, contracts and costs against what your business actually needs.
