our Services

Cherry Broadband can offer far more than simply a low contention broadband line for your business or home-office, we can also provision landlines, install your cabled or wireless data network (and CCTV security system), host your websites and email and provide online backup services.

• Connectivity: Broadband, Leased Lines and more
• Hardware: Routers etc
• Landlines
• Hosting: Websites, email
• Online Backup
• Security
• VPN
• Networks: Cabled, Wireless

Contention Ratios Exposed

Think of your broadband as a cake. Most ISP's need to share their cake between as many people as possible, in order to keep costs down. This means everyone gets a tiny slice.  At Cherry, we limit the number of people we'll share cake between, and when we have more users, we get more cakes. This is essentially what contention means - the number of other users sharing your broadband line. Higher contention (more users) means slower speeds (smaller slices).

Contention Ratios are the ‘skeleton in the closet’ for most ISP’s. Trying to find this information on their websites is almost impossible, if it’s there at all. The industry as a whole has done a good job of convincing people that the contention on their lines is a BT issue over which the ISP has no control – but the opposite is actually true;  the contention on your connection (the number of users who share your connection) is actually set by your ISP. The more users they can fit on a single connection the cheaper the connection becomes.

Industry standard contention is around 30:1 for business broadband, and the ISP’s who offer 'free' broadband are contending their connections as high as 300:1. In other words, at peak connection times, there could be as many as 300 other users uploading and downloading all on the same connection – which means an 8mb broadband connection would actually be functioning at about 27kb – slower than dial up speeds!

Cherry’s broadband service is focused on reliability, consistency and performance. Our approach to broadband is that you get what you pay for. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is – even if your Broadband is free you are probably losing what could add up to hours every week waiting for emails to send or to download from the internet. With Cherry you can have your cake, and eat it.