Techno babble translation please

[big soft moose]

Having some issues with ISS at work - basically we are a small office on a teleworker connection and our network speed sucks (particularly when connecting to the internet to manage blogs etc), I have been trying to get ISS to do something about this as I dont think 500kb/s or less is acceptable even down a copper line

this is their explanation of why they can't without spending a five figure sum - could anyone translate it into plain english please ?

At the end of the day this is a business solution which xxxx has invested heavily both in time and money over negotiating a contract to provide a product set which can support our business needs moving forward. xxxxxxx, by its very nature, presents a number of challenges when trying to provide this service....

...Technically the differences are significant not only between xxxxx and Residential Broadband, but even between the products within the xxxxxx portfolio. In this example, xxxx, has a contention ratio of 5:1 and a fixed upstream of 256k, where as residential broadband, although may provide 6mb download, this has a 50:1 contention ratio and a rate adaptive upstream of 256k, so you could get anything form 70k up to the 256k and you have no control over this. .

Basically i'd like to know if what they are saying makes sense or if i'm being fobbed off with techno babble - as far as i can see they are correct that there is a major diffeence between residential and our network - resedential users in the area (including me at home) are getting between 3-6mb/s downstream and about 500kb/s upstream down a phone line while our network connection is about 500/kbs down stream and less than 100kb/s upstream which means that even uploading a small picture file is a 'go away and make a cup of tea' type job

 

[mid_gen]

If nearby houses are getting good DSL speeds then there is no technical reason why you cannot get the same DSL speeds.

The second part is technically correct, in theory business services have lower contention than residential which guarantees a higher level of service. This should mean your business line is faster than nearby residential lines at peak times, so they are somewhat shooting themselves in the foot.

Anyway, beyond what speed connection you can get out of the office, the problem may be the destination network. Hard to comment really without know more details.

 

[unplugged]

Their talking about contention.

Simply put they are giving you a single carriageway road where only maybe 20 people have access to but has a speed limit of 40mph. Your pretty much guaranteed to get this speed as the road is always empty. 5:1 simply means worse case 5 people will be competing for your xxxxkbps of bandwidth.

A lot of home connections now thanks to DSL Max and other technology may be extremely fast however their a bit like the M6 where when everyone goes on in the evening to torrent Expendables and download porn and your left stuck behind some lorry begging them to open up the hard shoulder. Depending on your exchange and ISP this can vary massivly

Once the "Business" products have caught up with the ADSL2 products being offered at a reasonable cost they will probably upgrade you a lot of providers now are scrapping business products altogether and lumping them under the SOHO banner.

 

[onomatopoeia]

What is your sync speed?