FTTP
A pure fibre connection all the way into the building, FTTP ("fibre to the premises") offers the very best speeds available. It can be ordered in most locations and can give you speeds up to 1Gb/s. A cheaper version ("fibre first" FTTP) has now been rolled out in some areas.
Leased lines
For practices that need guaranteed speed and uptime, a leased line is an excellent choice. Unlike shared broadband, a leased line gives you a dedicated connection, with no contention with neighbouring businesses, delivering consistently high performance and low latency.
Leased lines also come with business-grade Service Level Agreements (SLAs), including a typical 6-hour fault response from the provider. This means if something goes wrong, you get priority attention and rapid resolution, ideal for practices that can't afford connectivity downtime.
FTTC
Also just called "fibre" (although confusingly, it actually isn't), this is "fibre to the cabinet" and is the mainstream product available at most sites. Costing around £40 a month for a typical business setup, this offers speeds of up to 80Mbps down and 20Mbps up.
ADSL and ADSL 2+
The first of the broadband generation, ADSL offers up to 8Mbps and is now considered too slow for most uses. ADSL 2+ offers speeds up to 24Mbps down and up to 2Mbps up. Both are slow by today's standards; if your provider has left you on these speeds, find another provider.
G.Fast
A copper based evolution of FTTC, this is the fastest available product before moving to FTTP. It is only available in some areas.
3G/4G/5G
Using a router which connects to one of the mobile phone networks can give you a good connection as fast as FTTC or even faster in some locations, although this varies widely and depends on signal strength. It is usually considered a backup rather than the main connection.
Automatic Internet failover: always connected
Modern dental software such as Dentally relies on a constant Internet connection. To protect against outages, our latest business-grade firewalls support automatic failover. This means we can install a secondary broadband line (for example, 4G/5G or an additional fibre/FTTC service) that takes over instantly if your main line goes down.
With automatic failover, your team can keep working, access patient records, and run cloud-based systems without interruption, even if your primary Internet fails. It's a simple, cost-effective way to keep your practice online and productive.