Home-based businesses often access the Internet more like homes than businesses, via the same $20-a-month dial-up Internet accounts that personal users favor. Although businesses generally require greater Internet horsepower than dial-up accounts can provide, the $1,000-a-month and up price tag for a commercial Internet connection hasn’t left many home-based businesses with any other choice.
Until now, that is. The spread of high-speed Internet access priced for the residential market is finally giving local home-based businesses a chance to get out of the information superhighway’s slow lane.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
“The biggest thing on a small office or home office owner’s wish list this year is probably fast Internet service,” said Terri Lonier, a consultant with the Internet site workingsolo.com. “They are really worth the investment. Just having instant access to the Internet 24 hours a day completely changes the way you interact with the Web.”
Two technologies are making high-speed Internet access a possibility for home-based businesses. The first of the technologies, and the most widely available today, are cable modems. Cox Communications has been offering the service locally for a little under a year.
Cable modems connect to the Internet via cable television wires, which have a much higher capacity for carrying data than standard telephone lines do. The service is “always on,” meaning there’s no need to dial into an Internet service provider, and it doesn’t tie up a phone line.
Cox Communication’s cable modem service costs between $30 and $50 a month plus an installation fee of about $100 or more.
The telephone company’s answer to cable modems is Digital Subscriber Line, or DSL, technology. DSL allows users to make calls and use to the Internet at ultra-fast speeds at the same time over the same regular copper telephone wire.
The service requires a special DSL modem on the customer’s end of the phone line and a similar piece of equipment on the other end of the line in Bell Atlantic’s central office, where telephone calls are routed to other local central offices or long distance carriers for completion.
Like cable modems, DSL is always on and doesn’t tie up the phone line. But DSL has a limited reach. The home office must be located within roughly two and a half miles to three miles of Bell Atlantic’s central office, depending on the specific type of DSL, to qualify for the service.
Among the companies offering or preparing to offer DSL service in parts of Rhode Island are: Bell Atlantic Corp., Log On America Inc., Intelecom Data Systems Inc., DSL.net, Big Dog Technologies Inc., Efortress, Intapp LLC and RIConnect.
Bell Atlantic’s basic residential DSL service, which costs just under $50 a month, not including the cost of the modem and installation, is capable of downloading files from the Internet 12 times faster than the fastest traditional analog modems.
But some home-based businesses may not require high-speed Internet connections even though they are becoming more affordable. The advertising and public relations firm Communications Works, which is run from owner Debbie Morais’ North Scituate home, still uses a dial-up Internet account.
“I can’t say that it’s really been a problem,” said Morais, who has separate phone lines for Internet access and her fax machine.
Morais still sees the computer itself as the most important technology available to home-based businesses. In fact, having a computer at home is often the spark that ignites a home-based business, she said.
Moralis, who teaches entrepreneurship for the Rhode Island Small Business Development Center at Bryant College, said an important trend in home office technology is that the business owners themselves are getting more sophisticated.
Up until recently, she said, home-based business owners didn’t have the time or the desire to deal with ever-changing technology.
“The products they bought had to be no-brainers, straight forward and easy to use. Home-based business owners generally bought the off-the-shelf products,” Morais said. “I would say in the last couple of years I have seen a greater degree of sophistication.”
