How AMVIA Delivered High-Availability Connectivity for RatedPeople.com's London HQ

What was the challenge?

RatedPeople.com's London headquarters runs its engineering, product, marketing, and operations teams on cloud services, video conferencing, and collaborative tools. The business was on business broadband — fine for a small team, but straining under a growing headcount and heavier cloud usage.

Two problems forced the upgrade. First, performance: peak-time degradation was disrupting video calls and access to cloud development environments, and the asymmetric broadband throttled the upload speeds developers and marketers depended on. Second, resilience: a prior broadband outage had cost several hours of disruption, and platform operations needed a contractual SLA plus a backup path during fault resolution.

The wider picture explains why. Industry surveying found that "94% of small businesses in the UK experience poor internet connection; 91% encounter internet outages" (survey of 500 UK SME decision-makers, Zen Internet/YouGov 2024). Downtime hits the smallest hardest: micro businesses experiencing at least one outage averaged "15.83 hours of downtime vs a UK business average of 9.56 hours" (Uswitch/Ofcom). For a connectivity-dependent marketplace, best-efforts broadband was a standing operational risk — the kind Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, tracks across business connectivity.

What did AMVIA do?

AMVIA ran a connectivity survey at the London HQ, checking availability across every carrier with network presence at the postcode. The building was on-net for two carriers — a premium metropolitan network and Openreach's national infrastructure — both quoting installation lead times of 30–90 working days.

AMVIA recommended a managed 1Gbps dedicated internet access circuit on the most competitive carrier, paired with a Cisco Meraki MX router configured for automatic 4G failover. The managed service wrapped in 24/7 circuit monitoring, carrier relationship management, and AmviaIQ for real-time bandwidth analytics and capacity planning.

The deployed solution comprised:

• A dedicated 1Gbps symmetric leased line delivering uncontended bandwidth for the full London team
• A Cisco Meraki MX security appliance acting as managed router and firewall
• A 4G failover modem providing automatic backup connectivity if the primary circuit faulted
• AmviaIQ integration for real-time utilisation monitoring, application performance visibility, and automated alerting to AMVIA's network operations team

AMVIA managed the full installation — coordinating the carrier survey, civil works, and configuration — and pre-configured the Meraki device before delivery, so on-site work needed minimal input from the RatedPeople.com team. Gigabit-grade connectivity of this kind is exactly what the UK government's Project Gigabit programme is rolling out nationally.

What were the results?

The upgrade landed immediately. The symmetric 1Gbps connection cleared the upload bottleneck that had slowed development deployments and large file transfers, and video conferencing improved sharply as the consistent low-latency link removed the audio dropouts and video artefacts common on shared broadband.

The resilience gain mattered just as much. The 99.99% SLA with a 4-hour onsite repair commitment gave the business the assurance it needed. In the months after deployment, the 4G failover activated once during a carrier-side fault — restoring team connectivity within 60 seconds and preventing any operational disruption while AMVIA managed the carrier fault resolution. Crucially, AMVIA's proactive monitoring meant the IT lead was told about the fault before any staff noticed, a clear shift from the previous reactive setup.

AmviaIQ gave the IT lead ongoing visibility of bandwidth utilisation, enabling capacity planning as the team grows.

Before and after: broadband vs the managed leased line

For context on what these circuits cost, a 1Gbps leased line starts from £129/month (AMVIA) — alternative networks such as CityFibre cluster lower than incumbents like BT and Vodafone.