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Interdart broadband

Interdart broadband

Established in 1986, Interdart has focused on providing quality Information Technology solutions for Government, Large Enterprises and Small Businesses alike. The Company's involvement in Internet services commenced in 1996 when Interdart was involved in developing the first UK on-line Insurance registration system. Interdart has since developed a full portfolio of Internet products with a primary focus on provision of quality services to the business sector.

ADSL Broadband

ADSL Broadband is a service available on BT PSTN telephone lines. It is available to most customers who reside within 5.5 Kilometers of an ADSL local exchange. ADSL provides a permanent Internet connection for a fixed monthly cost ( no call charges for Internet access). The cost is kept low through "Contention" whereby a number of users are "sharing" the same bandwidth. Home and small office users can take advantage of the 50:1 contention Home/Office version of ADSL offering up to 256k upstream and up to 512k downstream speeds - about 10 times faster than a modem connection. Larger business users are provided with a 20:1 contention service with downstream speeds of up to 2048k (40 times faster than a modem). All ADSL services are provided with a single static IP address, ideal if you need to run a mail server or VPN connections

How Contention Works

In reality the contention appears to be more like 500:10 rather than 50:1. As the number of sharing connections increases so the effect of other traffic on your speed becomes smaller. In order to further ensure fairness, Interdart apply a prioritisation rule on all ADSL services. All users start with priority 0. Any connection utilising more than 25% of their maximum connection capacity for 15 minutes will have their priority set to 1. Users taking more than 20% for a 2 hour moving average will have their traffic set to 2. Heavy users taking more than 25% of their maximum capacity for a 2 day moving average will have their priority set to 3. Internet Traffic is routed according to the assigned priority. In general this has the effect of reducing any adverse effect on normal traffic when a number of users are making simultaneous heavy demands on the service. This will have no detrimental effect on your ADSL maximum bandwidth nor on your contention ratio. The purpose is solely to provide the best possible service and response times to regular users.

SDSL and Leased Line services

Unlike the popular ADSL service, SDSL and Leased Line services provide symmetric bandwidth. This means that your outgoing bandwidth is the same as your incoming bandwidth. This makes the service suitable for companies that need to host their own web servers in-house, and those that have requirements for substantial outgoing traffic. Common uses include Head Office connections where there is a requirement for many VPN connections from branch offices or to roving or home users. SDSL services are provided on a contention basis in a similar manner to ADSL, The maximum contention ratio is 10:1 which means you are effectively sharing your bandwidth with 9 other companies. Consequently the service charges are substantially lower than the equivalent Leased Line service.

Bonded Broadband

The service provides a load balanced service across two or more similar speed DSL connections. Automatic fallback occurs if one or more connection fails, with automatic re-instatement when the service is re-established.

In the simple case, a business may require either faster ADSL upload speed, or may wish to add resilience and redundancy in order to maintain their business critical Internet connection. The solution from Interdart is to provision two ADSL lines using the same speed and contention ratio, and then bond them together to double the incoming and outgoing speeds (See notes on tunnelling and packet sequencing) to 1Mbit and 512Kbit respectively.

Whilst is must be noted that the set-up costs are higher, the monthly operating cost of £72 is slightly more than a 1Mbit single ADSL connection however the service will provide nearly double the upload speed and will automatically fall back to a single connection if a failure occurs in either of the two ADSL connections.

The Bonded service is offered on a contended traffic basis. The service is contended at 10:1, half the rate of normal Business ADSL. This contention is entirely separate to the ADSL/SDSL contention. The Tunnel server implements the contention and uses sophisticated fairness queueing and prioritisation algorithms to ensure that heavy users do not unduly degrade performance for normal users.

Interdart broadband