Shared offices in London often provide internet connectivity and this can come at a high premium.  In Central London it’s not unheard of for Shared Office Space providers to charge £100 per MB of connectivity per month, this is an extortionate price and I strongly recommend you look again at the office space.  This kind of price seriously limits any small business from running effective cloud services or hosted phone solutions.

The problem comes from the poor state of infrastructure in Central London when it comes to connectivity.  British Telecom has upgraded a lot of residential areas in outer London to FTTC this gives a reasonable connection speed of 80MB down and 20MB upload.  This is plenty of bandwidth for most businesses and comes at a reasonable price approximately £40 on a business grade package (plus line rental).

In Central London FTTC is rarely available instead the only kind of connectivity that tends to be available is a Leased Line, these are expensive (over £350 for a 30MB down connection) take a long time to install (often up to 6 months) and regularly commit you to 3 year contracts.

How much bandwidth do I need in a shared office space?  If you use the internet then you really want as much bandwidth as you can afford.  The main point to consider is you want to be able to work effectively, so that means putting a router that can manage your traffic so if you are downloading a big file this doesn’t impinge on the traffic from your VOIP phone service.  A small office of 20 people who aren’t doing any particularly heavy internet usage could manage with 10MB download and 5MB upload.

The shared office space are telling me to install my own connection, what do I do?  This depends on the technologies available, if you can’t afford a leased line or can’t commit to a 3 year term.  Then the default fall back solution is ADSL2+ this is available everywhere as long as you can get a BT telephone line into your office space.  ADSL2+ is relatively cheap but also slow compared to many modern connections but it is reliable and you can pay for a business service which has a guaranteed SLA on getting it fixed.

What other technologies are out there?  We have seen great results with using Relish 4G broadband service, the speed is excellent if you are in their service area, but the coverage area is relatively small.  A big benefit of Relish is that you can normally run it from within a shared office space and run your own network from it.  Urban Wimax can also deliver a good point to point wireless service but it tends to be expensive.

So what do I do when my business is moving office?  Talk to TechRelate before you sign a contract so we can work out with you what you require and the options that go with your office space.  Far better to know the cost of a reliable connection before you move than after you are committed to an office space.