Residential or Business DSL?

[Adrian Lopez]

My ISP offers two kinds of DSL service, one for residential use and a more expensive service for business use. Do those of you who work from home subscribe to Residential DSL service or do you pay extra for Business DSL? No doubt this depends on your ISP's policies, but I'm curious as to what's the most common scenario for people who work at home.

My ISP's rules concerning business use aren't stated anywhere I can find them, but to sign up for residential service they require customers to provide a work number. Whether this requirement has anything to do with residential versus business service, I have no idea.

I'm also curious about the use of residential telephone lines by people who work at home. The local telephone company -- which is also the sole DSL provider in the country -- prohibits the use of residential phone lines for business purposes. While I can understand charging business prices to customers in business locations, I don't see how the way I use my phone line should have anything to do with pricing.

Any thoughts and/or gripes on the matter?

[Tom Gilleland]

I use residential DSL and residential phone for my home office. The way I figure it is that I use it for at least half personal, half work. And I don't really care about having that phone number listed in the business directory. In fact, it is better if it isn't since I don't need sales calls all the time. That way I have more time to focus on productive things like this forum. :rolleyes: Also, DSL speed seems to be related to how close you are to a substation, which for my house seems to be pretty good.

The price of a product should not be different if it the same thing and just sold to different customers. (Business vs Residential)

Tom

[revve]

Sometimes you get better service with a business class dsl (better contention ratios, etc) but most of the time, the telcos just use it as an excuse to charge businesses more - at least, this is how it works in SA (mix of both, depending on which "broadband/slowband" service you go for)

[panda]

My ISP's rules concerning business use aren't stated anywhere I can find them, but to sign up for residential service they require customers to provide a work number. Whether this requirement has anything to do with residential versus business service, I have no idea.


Just give them your mobile number,just tell them the people who you work for don't like personal calls.

[Olivier]

I'm using Residential DSL but might swith to Business to claim some VAT back. Must compare several offers first.

[Kestral]

If you plan on running one or more servers through your DSL conn, note that your ISP may block the SMTP port (25) for their residential DSL service as an anti-spamming measure. In my case (BellSouth) they give you an SMTP server address to use for outbound mail, but the port block still interrupts inbound e-mail.

[Frozen In Ice]

My ISP offers both residential and business class cable access. Residential prevents customers from running servers at home (it's also in the TOS). The business class however allows servers to be on the network and a static IP is assigned to you. I was going to run the server here, but learned a valuable lesson that changed my mind. My ISP offers 3 business class packages with download speeds up 6MB/s, however the upload speed is limited to a maximum of 768kb/s. After much investigating on other forums related to operating servers, I was informed that the customer would be using the upload speed. Any more than 3 or 4 people downloading a file from the server and the customers would notice a severe drop in download speed of the file(s). Check the upload speed of the business package. I think you'll find it's quite low and you might want to take other avenues, such as a good hosting company (like Dewahost).

Best of luck :)

Glenn

[maular]

We run residential ADSL here at our full time studio, rather than a business deal. For our provider the only difference is the Service Level Agreement (ie, you basically don't get one on residential), and additional plans for business (ie SDSL).

The provider is extremely reliable anyway, and as we run our actual servers from a data centre we don't need massive upload speeds from the office.