small and medium size Businesses need to move from consumer fixed mobile services to business-grade services to achieve the performance and reliability they need to keep their businesses running.
This, according to Komsol Chief Commercial Officer Gary Woolley, means that downtime has become all too common in South Africa and a real business risk for small and medium-sized businesses that must stay connected to survive. That's what it means.
A recent study by World Wide Worx once again shows that reliable technology is essential to the growth and efficiency of small and medium-sized businesses.
Woolley said: “Connectivity underpins all digital technology, so small businesses cannot afford to rely on unreliable or poor communications infrastructure.”
However, many small businesses still rely on consumer-grade fiber optics and fixed mobile connectivity to support mission-critical business systems and processes. These consumer-grade products often don't meet the needs of digitally-enabled small businesses, Woolley says.
“Fiber reliability has declined in recent years, and much of the mobile market has moved to 5G for improved performance and capacity. However, the general market perception is that all 5G is equal. That's not the case. Consumer-grade 5G connects thousands of people competing for capacity. It's a best-effort service, subject to traffic throttling and shaping. This can often result in customers losing access to the services they paid for. Another big problem is that consumer networks can go down during load shedding.
Woolley said another drawback to consumer 5G is that it often uses indoor routers, where the signal doesn't necessarily pass through buildings.
Woolley said small and medium-sized businesses rely on consumer solutions because they don't understand the difference between consumer and business connectivity products, or because true enterprise-grade fixed wireless access 5G products He said this may be because it was not available in the past.
Comsol bridges the gap with FWA 5G for business
Comsol has decades of experience building robust and advanced solutions for large enterprises, and recently launched a 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) solution that is ideal for redundancy in large enterprises or as primary connectivity for small and medium-sized businesses. We have expanded our portfolio.
ComSol's 5G FWA is purpose-built for business, Woolley says. Comsol has built a 5G ecosystem from core to customer premises equipment (CPE) end devices and upgraded its power infrastructure to accommodate the increased power consumption due to 5G.
“With our 5G FWA, we are expanding our enterprise offerings with dedicated, non-oversubscribed base stations for business 5G, all with a robust power infrastructure designed to sustain networks during extended power outages. Importantly, it has dual fiber and microwave backhaul feeds to ensure that the network does not go down in the event of a fiber network failure.”
This solution, available through select partners, uses outdoor fixed CPE and provides significantly better service than indoor routers and mobile phones.
“We're solely focused on business, so there's not too much competition for capacity that would congest traffic,” Woolley said. “Consumer networks rarely give you the capacity and reliability you sign up for, but we guarantee you get the service you sign up for.”
Premium Comsol 5G FWA products are competitively priced, uncapped, and available (for the time being) in 25Mbit/s, 50Mbit/s, and 100Mbit/s. “We aim to be competitive in the market on price and provide a much better experience and more value than consumer-grade solutions,” says Woolley.
“Our business is to ensure South African businesses stay online. Over the years, we have built complex, mission-critical private networks for large corporations, industrial sites and mines. Our 5G FWA services lower the barrier to entry and give small businesses access to the same enterprise-grade experience.”
“Connectivity is just as important to small businesses as it is to large enterprises, and we take their needs just as seriously. With our new 5G FWA, we are giving them the capacity, performance, and We make sure we get reliability,” Woolley said.