Testimonials
09/Apr/2010Northampton Science Park
"Over the last 5 Years Watchfront have given us great advice, starting with the design of our network.
The Firebricks have proved to be perfect for our serviced office application and whenever we've needed assistance the support has been excellent...
Highly recommended"
Steve McNair
Manager
Northampton Science Park
23/Sep/2009ITEC LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
Itec is a small company providing training services to the IT industry. Our building is a fair distance from the local exchange, and as the need to deliver online training courses has grown, we found it difficult to get the necessary bandwidth at a reasonable cost.
Initially we went with a 2 way satellite broadband service, which met our needs, but was very expensive and due to high lag times didn’t give a great user experience. In February 2005 we signed up for Bonded ADSL with Watchfront. The setup process was painless and the improvement and cost saving was significant. In early 2009 we doubled the number of lines due to increased bandwidth requirements. There were some problems during this upgrade, (not caused by Watchfront), and they were dealt with efficiently and patiently by the Watchfront team. We now have a fast reliable service with the bandwidth that we need.
One of the best features of the service is the continuity. We have rarely had any issues, and they have always been dealt with rapidly. We don’t have the staff to constantly monitor our connection so stability is our first consideration. Dealing with the same team of people is a big help too. I can pick up the phone and get straight through to the same person I dealt with in 2005. There have been several occasions when Watchfront have contacted us about problems with an individual line before we even knew there was an issue!
Watchfront are not the cheapest out there, but they offer peace of mind and great service at a reasonable price. I recommend them.
Richard Wallace
Technical trainer
21/Jul/2009Deep
16/Jul/2009Instant PR
In 2004 we started using Watchfront for broadband and server hosting (otherwise known as colocation). Throughout the last five years we have found the service provided to be reliable, flexible and friendly. On the small number of occasions when things have gone wrong, we've found the level of technical support to be excellent. If there is a problem, then Watchfront admit to it, and post full updates as things progress - something many ISPs could learn from. It is nice not being kept in the dark.
On the occasions when we've needed more in-depth advice and help we've found Watchfront ready, willing and able to assist. This advice has covered a broad range of topics as VoIP, online backups, subnetting, firewalling, traffic management, virtualising services, DNS, email serving and many others, too numerous to mention. For all of these reasons - and that although they are not the cheapest in the marketplace, they do offer very good value for money, we have recommended Watchfront to many others, some of whom we know have signed-up with them, and are now experiencing similar service.
Alex Bloor
08/Sep/2008Countryside Broadband
Countryside Broadband has been operating since December 2003 providing broadband services in South Oxfordshire. Our service is delivered over a wireless network using radios manufactured by Alvarion. A 2 Mbit/s private circuit provided our main backhaul but even though there were gradual reductions in price, largely because of the activities of Ofcom, it was still our largest single expense. We started looking around to see if we could find a better way of obtaining the high-quality bandwidth that we needed. There are several possibilities, but many of them required that our local exchange had enhanced equipment either from BT or some other operator. Unfortunately, there was little prospect of an upgrade in the near future.
We then wondered whether we could combine several low-cost ADSL lines to get better reliability and higher peak capacity. There are several suppliers in the market, but on closer inspection we found that most of the systems don’t really combine the lines in the way we wanted. We had to be sure that if one line went down the others would take up the load in a seamless way without any reconfiguration of our equipment. We also wanted the traffic to be equally shared over the lines and packets sent over whatever line could take them.
The Bonded ADSL system, developed by Watchfront, suited us admirably and met all our requirements. The Firebrick hardware has proved utterly reliable and the technical support from Watchfront has been outstanding. We now have a system that saves us several thousand pounds a year and provides more capacity than we had before. We have integrated it into our SNMP network management system so that we can see how things are working. We have seen a few occasions where there has been a hiccup on an ADSL modem but the traffic has been shared properly between the others with no service interruption. The only negative we have seen is that the system delay is a few milliseconds more than the old private circuit.
We are pleased to recommend Watchfront’s service.
Bill Pechey