One in three businesses uses niche ISP (OUT-LAW.COM)

This Out-Law.com article is a summary of a 28 page report published by Ofcom on what they term 'niche' internet service providers. Niche ISPs are defined as those with fewer than 150 employees and it appears that a third of UK businesses use these, whereas only 5% of consumers use them.

Not surprisingly, the research found that most of the niche ISP business is in serving other small companies: "88% of the ISPs serviced the micro-company market of firms with fewer than 10 employees, while 86% serviced the small company market of firms with up to 30 employees." I say 'not surprisingly' because as a micro business myself and web liaison for UKeiG (which could also be described as micro) I have found that the large ISPs cannot, or rather will not, provide us with the type of service that we require at a price that we can afford. You have to choose from their standard packages and that is that.

The report says that the ISPs themselves believe that it is their small size and approachability which makes them attractive to customers: 34% believed that customers came to them because the technical support was a person on the phone rather than a series of automated systems and long telephone queues. For myself and UKeiG that is only part of the reason. It is true that when something goes wrong, which it rarely does, we get through immediately to someone who understands the technology and is based at the company itself in the UK rather than Outer Mongolia! I had a very interesting discussion a few years ago with a Freeserve support desk "consultant", who was totally lost when he had to deviate from his script and didn't know the difference between SMTP and POP3 mail servers. It took me an hour and a half to escalate my enquiry through the hierarchy before I reached a tech savvy person. Then there was the incident with Pipex who took 3 months to transfer the old UKOLUG domain names to our new ISP, but I digress...

We have found that niche suppliers will happily customise web hosting, email boxes, PHP, SSI etc. and they know what they and we are talking about. A quote from one niche ISP, and which summarises their strengths, says:

"Delivery [is] by fully qualified engineers, not a call centre. We can identify and diagnose the problem and surgically solve the problem in real time."

So who do I and UKeiG use? I use ICUK and UKeiG's Internet and web presence is supplied by Merula. Both have provided excellent service to date, quickly solved the few problems that have arisen - even when it was down to our own stupidity! - and seem to have people in the office 24/7, 7/7, including 7.37 am on one Sunday morning :-)