Business Broadband: What Consumers Do Not Get

Business broadband on the same line as a consumer product costs more, and the difference is not speed. It is four specific things, and the honest question is which of them your business actually needs, because paying for all four when you need one is common.

One: a repair time that is contractual

This is the difference that matters most and the one people notice too late. Consumer broadband has no committed repair time. A fault is fixed when it is fixed, and the queue is the queue.

A business product attaches a target repair time, often next working day, sometimes same day, and, crucially, makes it a term of the contract rather than an aspiration. The right question to ask any provider is exactly that: is the repair time contractual, and what happens if it is missed.

If the connection carries card payments, a phone system, or remote access to anything, this alone justifies the price difference. A day offline costs more than a year of the uplift.

Two: static addressing

Consumer connections generally get an address that can change, and increasingly sit behind shared addressing entirely. A static address is the thing you need for hosting anything, reaching a camera or a recorder from outside, or restricting access to a system by origin.

If none of that applies to your business, it is a feature you are paying for and not using. Plenty of small businesses need a fast connection and nothing else, and there is no shame in buying a consumer product for them.

Where it does apply, ask whether the static address is included or an add-on, and how many you get. The answer varies more than you would expect between providers on the same network.

Three: contention and traffic handling

Business products are frequently provisioned with a lower contention ratio, meaning fewer customers sharing the same capacity, which shows up as more consistent performance at the times everybody else is busy.

On full fibre this matters less than it used to, because the capacity is larger to begin with. On a cabinet-based connection it can be the difference between a usable and an unusable afternoon.

Ask for the contention ratio and treat a refusal to state one as an answer. A provider selling genuinely business-grade capacity will normally tell you.

Four: who answers, and how quickly

Business support is generally a different queue with different hours and staff who can escalate to the network operator. That is worth something on a working day and nothing at all on a Sunday evening.

The practical test is not the promise but the hours. A business product with support that closes at five is not much use to a business that trades in the evening, and that is a mismatch worth catching before signing.

Ask whether there is a named escalation route and whether a fault gets a reference you can chase with. Both are ordinary on business products and unusual on consumer ones.

The market has thinned, which changes your options

Some providers have left this part of the market. Plusnet Business stopped selling broadband in June 2024, continuing phone service for a period afterwards, which means small businesses on old Plusnet lines are effectively on consumer terms whatever the account says.

If that is you, the important thing is that nothing about your service level was ever renegotiated — it simply stopped being a business product. Worth establishing before a fault rather than during one.

More broadly, the resellers that used to compete here were mostly selling copper, and full fibre has consolidated the field. Fewer options, generally better products.

How to decide in ten minutes

Write down what stops if the connection stops. If the answer includes taking payments, answering phones, or anyone being unable to work, buy the contractual repair time. If the answer is that email arrives later, do not.

Then check whether anything needs reaching from outside the building. If yes, you need static addressing; if no, you do not. Those two questions decide most of it, and the rest is price.

See the providers and their networks, what full fibre changes and the provider that left this market.

The backup connection question

For a business that genuinely cannot be offline, the answer is not a better single line. It is a second connection on a different network, which is cheaper than most people assume and is the only arrangement that survives a cable being cut in the street.

The usual pairing is a fixed line plus a mobile-based backup: a router that fails over to a 4G or 5G connection automatically when the primary drops. It does not need to match the primary on speed; it needs to keep card payments and phones working for a day.

What matters is that the two paths are genuinely independent. Two providers reselling the same wholesale network share the same street cabinet and the same duct, so a physical fault takes both out at once. A fixed line plus mobile is independent; two Openreach resellers are not.

Frequently asked questions