In a world of comparison websites, price cutting and declarations of newer, faster connection speeds, it’s easy to think that – when it comes to business broadband – the buying decision revolves purely around Megabytes per second and Pounds Sterling per month.
But as chartered surveyors Madlin & Maddison found out recently, there are many other factors to consider: especially when your business revolves around having stable, reliable internet connectivity 24 hours a day.
Founded in 1951 and HQ’d in Woking, Surrey, Madlin & Maddison is a 25 strong practice of chartered surveyors and property consultants advising on the design, construction, repair, maintenance and refurbishment of all types of property throughout the United Kingdom.
“We provide Madlin & Maddison with Premium ADSL 8000, an SMTP mail feed, web space, a MySQL database and domain names – essentially the entire Internet toolkit from which they run their business,” reports Datanet’s MD, Conleth McCallan. “We’ve been their connectivity provider since 1997, back in the days of dial-up connections. Nonetheless they were tempted by new, lower prices from BT and the telecoms Goliath’s offer of a free upgrade to FTTC (Fibre-to-the-Cabinet). Despite our proposal of a loyalty discount, Madlin & Maddison scheduled a switch from Datanet to BT for 29 May.”
Andy Merry, Partner at Madlin & Maddison takes up the story – “I realised very quickly I’d made a terrible mistake! The new BT installation did not work out at all as I expected and we were left high and dry on day 1 with no Internet access and no email. I must have made a dozen calls to various parts of BT but got nowhere. In desperation I called Datanet and, thank goodness, they spent a large part of that same day and the next (Saturday) trying to get us back on line and eventually succeeded.”
“The time my company had to endure without email was incredibly disruptive. We cannot risk that happening again and so, not having the support to resolve matters, I cancelled our contract with BT after just one day and resumed the relationship with Datanet, who have done everything they can to help sort out the mess we were left in and to futureproof our Internet connectivity.”
