News

February 1st 2010

New Year – New Products!

We think 2010 will see increased interest in network security and particularly on threat management at the point of network access. This is traditionally provided on a firewall at the site, but with the capital costs and the need to upgrade with changes to the business, plus the management overhead of having staff trained in all the firewall variants, clients are increasingly looking to have this provided as part of a managed service.

Smart-Secure is our new network-based security service where all the threat management is provided within the network. When delivered with say a leased line, Smart-Connect service or even a basic broadband connection the public IP is retained within our network and the service delivered to your site is provided on your private LAN IP addresses. In essence the LAN port on your firewall is now the network service. Link Connect manage the firewall functionality for you, or you can have Administrator access and complete this yourself. All the usual functionality like VPN connections, anti-virus, content management and port forwarding can be configured as before but now much of the traffic managed by the firewall no longer runs on your access circuit, making it much more efficient.

There are options suitable for just a few users to thousands and all available now.

If you are considering upgrading your firewalls at any site call the Sales Team at Link Connect and see how a combined access circuit and Smart-Secure could save you time and money.

15^th January 2010

2009 – Good or Bad?

Well it was hard work that is certain. There was no free lunch available and all our staff worked hard to achieve our sales growth and meet our high standards of customer service.

The growth in our Smart-Connect product has again shown how important it is to have reliable and scalable connectivity in today's business environment and how, for many customers there are few alternatives. We doubled installations of Smart-Connect in 2009 against the previous year. Quite an achievement in todays straightened times. However, maybe we should not be surprised as Smart-Connect represent’s very good value for money, and in many cases we have saved customers several thousand pounds against their original connectivity.

Basic failures during the bad weather of February 2009 and again in December and this January had little or no impact on our Smart-Connect customers, with only one experiencing any outage due to line problems. Our overall availability across our network service is very close to five 9s, representing an average unavailable time for all customers of less than five minutes in the year. This was achieved through careful deployment of our network, aggressive management of our partners and the use of continuous monitoring to predict likely points of failure correcting early. We were even able to diagnose a likely memory fault in an access device and have it exchanged before it failed.

With customers increasingly relying on access the need for high bandwidth, high availability and simple delivery has never been greater.

25^th December 2009

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our customers from everyone at Link-Connect!

12^th December 2009

Building a Digital Britain

Link-Connect were interviewed for the upcoming “Building a Digital Britain” film for The Business Channel, and due to be broadcast on Sky and Freesat early in 2010.

The film, also to be available on the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) websites examines a number of key issues surrounding the deployment of next generation networks in the UK as part of the government’s Building a Digital Britain” campaign. Martin Alexander (MD) and David Amos (Director, Sales & Marketing) made the case for Bonded ADSL and other services to supplement the infrastructure where the next generation technologies will not be available for several years. Video of the interviews will be available on the Link-Connect website and here on

3^rd December 2009

Keep in touch!

A new study has revealed that the average UK adult spends 68 hours online and over 7 hours using their mobile phone every month. This equates to over a month (34 days) a year online and three and a half days per year on the phone.

The Moneysupermarket survey was conducted by Opinium Research with over 2000 British adults between Friday 21st and Tuesday 25th August 2009. It found that 59% feel they would be cut off from the world without a phone or Internet connection.

Technology is so important that people would find it hard to keep in touch with friends and family, with 30% of adults admitting they would contact people less without access to the Internet or a mobile phone. Some 14% wouldn’t know how to keep in touch if they did not have a mobile or Internet connection. With the internet rapidly becoming a preferred way of staying in contact with the world, Link-Connect are working harder than ever to continue to provide fast and reliable connections to all our customers.