The benefits

You can use the lightning-fast Ethernet connections from Openreach to bring an exciting new range of services within reach of your customers, as well as to satisfy your own backhaul requirements. Here are just some of the benefits of choosing Ethernet Services from Openreach:

• Guaranteed speeds. Whether your customers want 10Mbit/s or 10Gbit/s from you, that's exactly what they get.
• Unrivalled national geographic coverage. We've invested heavily to ensure that the network is available where you and your customers need it. Our footprint covers all major towns and cities and thousands of out-of-town locations.
• Highly flexible. You and your customers can use the network to do everything you do now, only better, faster and at a much reduced cost compared to the legacy alternatives.
• Low latency and jitter. Our network supports the most challenging data exchange speeds and supports the envisaged increase in telepresence applications.
• Scalable. Once provisioned (the standard lead time is 30 working days, subject to survey), we can usually upgrade bandwidths within a few days.
• Inherently reliable. Fibre is the most dependable transmission medium you can get. Not much can go wrong with it, and it's far less prone to developing weather-induced faults than copper-based legacy circuits. We also monitor our Ethernet network 24x7. And we use powerful diagnostics and advanced network management tools to spot and resolve the majority of network problems in their infancy, before they get a chance to affect service. When we can't fix problems remotely, our nationally-based team of over 21,000 engineers is on hand to make sure that we stick to our target fix time of five hours. If all else fails, strict automated Service Level Agreements ensure that we put our money where our mouth is if we don't deliver on our network availability promises for Ethernet.
• Disaster recovery. Because of the way Ethernet services are deployed, via exchanges dotted around the country, any two customer sites (for example, a corporate HQ and its data centre) can be hundreds of miles apart. So if the HQ is taken down by flood, fire or an act of terrorism, their communications can be switched to another, pre-determined location within a relatively short space of time; providing, of course, that they have a disaster recovery plan in place.
• Supports mission critical applications. Although we already offer extremely high levels of network availability to support mission critical applications (or even life critical ones), our Resilience Options can give you and your customers even more confidence that no single cable or node failure in the local access network will interrupt service. If someone cuts or damages a fibre cable, for example, network traffic can be automatically switched over to a standby path in as little as 50 milliseconds!
• CESG IL2 assurance for EAD. As well as ticking the boxes for central and local government contracts (including schools, defence and health departments), IL2 assurance also helps you to give non-government organisations the confidence that our products are ready to combat the very real threats posed to data transfer in the 21st Century. Watch this space - other products in our portfolio are set to follow suit in the future.
• Fit for the future. As a next generation compatible technology Ethernet provides a confident migration path into the future. It will also be the focus of future Openreach innovation and pricing initiatives to come. In other words, your customers can be confident in your ability to prepare and build their organisations for the future; while you are ready to offer them aggressively-priced solutions and realise revenues faster than would otherwise be the case.