Service offices make a lot of sense for a start up recruitment business.. at evolve, we have quite a few  lients who have grown way beyond start-up (100-200 consultants now) who are still in service office space, simply because it offers the same kind of benefits that software-as-a-service evolve does in terms of on-demand scalability and variablised cost.

One thing that comes up fairly frequently though is the quality (or lack of) of the service associated with the bundled broadband service that many serviced office providers offer as part of their 'all inclusive' packages.

On the face of it, these all in one deals often look good, often promising several MB of connectivity as part of the package.

And to be fair, many of the service offerings do work pretty well. At evolve, We have lots of customers working out of service offices (including both high-street names and independents) who use the bundled broadband service and get on fine with no problems.

At the same time, we do see quite a few who don't which is obviously a concern for us as this impacts on their experience with evolve.

Common complaints associated with Service Office bundled Internet connectivity are :

• Lack of reliability.
• General slowness or slowness are particular times of the day or week.
• Restrictions on the use of certain protocols or applications.
• Routing issues (can't get to some locations on the internet).

Frequently attempts to then resolve this with the service office provider are then met either with a lack of commitment (often it is a service they in turn outsorce and getting to speak to the right people is difficult), or with a response that is something along the lines of:

'that is just our basic service which is shared and therefore has no SLA..but guess what we can sell you you own dedicated connection for just £LARGE SUM per month! (oh, and our terms don't allow you to get you own independant ADSL line in either)..have a nice day'

Ouch!

So a couple of things to make sure you do about if you are about to sign into a contract for some service office space

No.1  is to make sure you ask them for a written commitment in terms of a service level guarantee for the connection they will be providing.

This should include bandwith (throughput for both upload and download), a commitment to  uptime/ reliability and a list of any protocols/ services that might be blocked. Ask them if they can provide you with some stats (which they should be able to get from their equiptment) to back this up. Ask them what time-to-fix commitment they have in place and how their services are managed (is it inhouse, outsourced or perhaps done centrally).

As far as uptime is concerned, remember that evolve offers a 99.999% service level guarantee to our customers (that's no more that 25 secs downtime per month.. in practice we have delivered 100% for a very long time now).. so if they are offering anything less than 99.9% (about 45 mins per month), I'd look elsewhere.

It is also worth trying to negotiate the right to put in your own ADSL or Leased line, should their service not be up-to-scratch.. you will find that many providers simply won't entertain this (from a practical perspective it might be difficult for them to accomodate), but it is worth asking as we have several customers who have successfully negotiated it in.

As a fall back to this, negotiate up-front for any cost associated with their provision of dedicated connectivty at any point in the future. The starting point for your negotiation should be the cost of independently providing ADSL.

If you are already in a contract of course, your options might be more limited. In the first instance, do take a look at the detail of your contract. You may well find that ther are committed to offering a

service level that is not being met, or that there is some other clause that will allow you to bring pressure to bear.

When it comes to fault-finding/ making a case there are also a few things you can do that will help.

1. Log the times when the service is poor, or unavailable. If they know exactly when something occured, they may be able to cross-reference it with an activity on the network.

2. Use a tool like PingPlotter www.pingplotter.com to record network performance against a well-known, reliable host (bbc.co.uk is a good bet for this). PingPlotter will measure the connection's latency (how long traffic takes to be routed between your computer and the destination) and provide a graph that you can use to demonstrate performance problems. As a guideline, a typical ADSL connection will run at around 20-30 milliseconds to ping the bbc from a point on the UK network. At 75+ms the connection is noticiably 'laggy' - slow to respond, from tab to tab in evolve for example

3. It's also worth taking a look at just what you are doing on your own network. Is the service actually up (even if it was working well) to supporting all you are asking of it.

evolve itself requires very little bandwith to use (we have dozens of companies who use 2Mb ADSL to support 25+ recruitment consultants), but obviously your milelage will vary according to the other things that you are doing.. particular culprits are video (youtube for instance), audio (iTunes or Internet Radio), file sharing and email (a 1Mb email will take around 30 seconds to send via a 256mb upstream connection, which can consume much of the available connectivity while it goes).