Fibre optics plan could prompt other businesses to invest in SDSL broadband

SDSL broadband customers may be interested to know that the importance of a high-speed business connection has been reaffirmed in Manchester.

The Corridor Manchester partnership, a body that promotes the Oxford Road area of the city, has appointed specialist telecoms company Geo to install fibre optic cables over the next 12 months.

It means that businesses and institutions from St Peter’s Square to Whitworth Park will enjoy speeds of up to 100 megabits per second and, just like broadband SDSL, upstream and downstream rates will be identical.

The area employs 55,000 people, comprising 18 per cent of the total workforce in Manchester.

And they generate a staggering £2.8 billion or nearly a quarter of the city’s gross value added.

Commenting on the scheme, Jackie Potter, chief executive of Corridor Manchester, said: “The new fibre optic cables will create a new infrastructure on the corridor that will not only deliver much faster broadband speeds but, through the open access network, allow organisations, businesses and individuals [to] develop and test their own ideas for uses of the new technology.”

This high-speed broadband project will be managed by the Manchester Digital Development Agency and funded by the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA).

Damien Bourke, policy and partnership manager for the NWDA, said that it will help the Manchester Corridor workforce “generate further wealth” for the city.

Sadly, many companies outside the Manchester Corridor area will be unable to connect to this fibre broadband network.

Rather than being left behind with slow connections, they may wish to consider switching to SDSL broadband.

That’s because SDSL broadband offers faster speeds without the need to switch from copper lines to expensive fibre optics.

Google Docs changes may have business broadband implications

SDSL has many advantages, not least the fact that it offers unusually fast upload rates.

With an SDSL connection, upstream is identical to downstream and this comes in particularly useful when businesses need to access cloud computing.

Well now a major development over in California could herald a new era for this fast-emerging IT sector.

From now on, Google Docs will allow people to upload any type of file, not merely spreadsheets, documents, PDFs and presentations.

And with the service accepting files up to 250MB in size, this means it’s now possible for SDSL customers to quickly store bulky items like hi-res graphics, charts and vodcasts.

However, one thing that the SDSL community should bear in mind is that Google Docs has an overall upper limit of 1GB so you can only keep four 250MB files at one time.

The rollout of this new feature is occurring in stages across January 2009 – Google Docs account holders will be told when it has gone live by a pop-up that appears once they have signed in.

SDSL customers who haven’t yet entered the cloud are missing out on what promises to be the next stage in the evolution of the internet.

Innovative services such as Google Docs, Apple MobileMe and Google Apps let users store files online instead of on temperamental internal servers or their desktop.

Even better, work colleagues can then access those same files and make changes that become instantly visible to everybody else in the group.