MARKETWATCH
EXIT MATTERS...
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BROADBAND
update:
By Nigel Cook, CEO of Evolution Capital
When in France we like to shop at small specialist stores or market stalls. Food is always well presented but unlike us Brits, the French will pick the stuff up and press it, squeeze and smell it. Whatever they buy, they want it to pass their quality control tests.
While we in the UK may be less picky about our food, French principles apply when you’re shopping for a business. The seller produces an Information Memorandum to pitch their case to potential buyers. It’s a vital document and one that demands discipline from your advisors as well as a, perhaps agonising, self appraisal from you.
There are three essential elements. Firstly, you have to identify your target audience accurately and show clearly why your business makes an attractive proposition. Secondly, the Information Memorandum must be comprehensive and up-to-date. It has to be thorough enough to attract offers, but you don’t need to itemise the teaspoons in the coffee corner. Think of it as a game of Bridge: If your hand is long suited and worth 18 points and your partner’s is worth 17, you’ll find your way to a slam without knowing exactly where the two of clubs lies.
Finally, be accurate. You’re entitled to present your company in the best possible light, but always be careful. I’ve seen documents claiming profits when the business was actually running up losses. Due diligence will expose the facts and it will prove expensive.
The best advice is as St Paul said, to ‘know thyself’. Over the third bottle at dinner an old friend still recalls that 50 years ago he managed to date the most targeted girl in the office. Over dinner, with a smooth jazz trio in the background, he incautiously kept ordering more wine.
When it came to pay he was five shillings short looking at a pile of small change on the table. The waiter patted him on the back and said, ‘That’s alright, sonny’. He didn’t even get a kiss.
With over 50 per cent of SMEs predicted to move to MPLS private networks in the next two years, Internet-facing QoS is quickly becoming a redundant technology, writes Andrew Dickinson, Sales and Marketing Director of Griffin Internet.
n July of 2007 Griffin launched its public Internet QoS. This allowed resellers to prioritise one application (usually voice) over all other data being transmitted on an individual Internet-facing broadband line. Since then QoS products have developed so that we now offer six priority queues on private MPLS, and operate 10 different priorities on our core network to protect customers against DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, peer to peer and streaming applications.
I
Andrew Dickinson
Of course, QoS has been around for years but its use had traditionally been restricted to private leased line networks where bandwidth is uncontended, predictable and symmetrical. One of the unique challenges with broadband QoS is that almost every line can attain a different speed, and this will vary depending on the number of people using that part of the network and the policies of the ISP. Also with ADSL the downstream is usually faster than the upstream.
n
Whereas traditional QoS works on the basis of assigning set bandwidths to specific applications – for example 100k for voice, 400k for HTTP, 500k for video – broadband policies have to be far more flexible to take account of the fact that at certain times (and depending on the end user) there may not be 1Mb of bandwidth available. The adoption of QoS has been faster on the new agile MPLS private networks than on Internet-facing broadband lines for a couple of reasons. Firstly, to protect the quality of their products the early movers in hosted
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voice insisted that their resellers used one broadband line for voice and another for everything else. This policy persisted even with the introduction of several public Internet QoS products, and nearly three years after Griffin launched EB-SP most will still not let you mix voice and data on the same DSL line.
Secondly, most customers will want the privacy of voice conversations protected, and a popular way of achieving this is to create a secure VPN tunnel over the public Internet. Public Internet QoS products are not able to see inside the secure tunnel and are not therefore able to prioritise the voice packets.
Increasingly, the SME market is demanding private broadband networks because they are considered to be far more suitable for business. None of a company’s traffic touches the public Internet until they choose to ‘break-out’, which means they can dispense with complicated and expensive SSL and IPsec solutions. A private MPLS network can run several QoS queues. The choice is not only to prioritise voice over everything else, meaning that the overall quality on the network is easier to control.
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