Reference

Every term
on your quote, explained.

Written for the person signing the purchase order, not the person configuring the switch. If a vendor has used a word you nodded along to, it's probably here.

38 terms

A

ANPRAutomatic Number Plate RecognitionSecurity: Camera-based reading of vehicle registration plates, logged and optionally used to trigger barriers or alerts.; Why it matters: It needs a dedicated camera at the right angle, distance and shutter speed. A general-purpose camera pointed at a gate will not read plates reliably.; Related service

C

Cat6ACabling: A copper cabling standard supporting 10 Gbps to the full 100 metres, with better interference rejection than Cat6.; Why it matters: Labour dominates cabling cost, so the incremental spend on Cat6A is small and usually the cheaper decision across the life of the installation.; Related service
CIRCommitted Information RateConnectivity: The bandwidth a provider contractually guarantees to deliver, as opposed to a peak or 'up to' figure.; Why it matters: 'Up to 100 Mbps' is a marketing number. A CIR of 100 Mbps is a promise with consequences attached. When comparing quotes, compare CIRs.
Contention ratioConnectivity: How many subscribers share the same underlying capacity. 1:1 means nobody shares yours; 20:1 means twenty premises may be contending for it.; Why it matters: It's the single figure that explains why broadband feels fast in the morning and slow after lunch — and it's rarely printed on the quote. Ask for it.

D

DIADedicated Internet AccessConnectivity: A private internet circuit where the full bandwidth is yours alone, not shared with other subscribers, and upload matches download.; Why it matters: It's the difference between a connection that behaves the same at 4pm as at 4am and one that doesn't. If you host anything, run VoIP, or terminate VPNs, the symmetric upload matters more than the headline number.; Related service
DRaaSDisaster Recovery as a ServiceInfrastructure: Standby infrastructure holding replicated copies of your systems, ready to run when the primary site can't.; Why it matters: Backup returns your data; DR returns your service. Restoring several terabytes onto hardware you haven't bought yet is not a recovery plan.; Related service

F

Fail-safe vs fail-secureSecurity: On power loss, a fail-safe lock releases and a fail-secure lock stays locked.; Why it matters: This is a life-safety decision dictated by fire regulations, not a preference. Escape routes must release; secure stores may not. Get it confirmed in writing.; Related service
FailoverNetworking: Automatic switching to a backup path or device when the primary fails, ideally without anyone noticing.; Why it matters: Untested failover fails when you need it. If nobody has deliberately unplugged the primary and watched what happens, treat it as not working.; Related service
Fiber opticCabling: Cabling that carries data as light through glass strands. Singlemode (OS2) goes kilometres; multimode (OM3/OM4) is for shorter high-speed runs.; Why it matters: Immune to electrical interference and electrically isolating, which makes it the only sensible choice between buildings and along noisy routes.; Related service
FirewallSecurity: A device or software that permits or blocks traffic according to policy. A next-generation firewall also inspects what's inside the traffic, not just where it's going.; Why it matters: A firewall is only as good as its rule base. An expensive appliance running a permissive three-year-old policy provides very little protection.; Related service

I

IP PBXVoice: A phone system running as software, handling extensions, call routing, voicemail and reporting over the network.; Why it matters: Adding a user becomes a config change rather than an engineer visit — and you finally get reporting on how many calls go unanswered.; Related service

J

JitterVoice: Variation in latency between packets. Steady 40 ms is fine; bouncing between 10 ms and 200 ms is not.; Why it matters: Jitter, not bandwidth, is what makes voices sound robotic and choppy. A connection can pass a speed test perfectly and still be unusable for calls.

L

LANLocal Area NetworkNetworking: The network inside one building or site — switches, cabling and wireless serving local devices.; Why it matters: Most 'the internet is slow' complaints turn out to be LAN problems. Fixing the circuit when the fault is a duplex mismatch changes nothing.; Related service
LatencyNetworking: How long a packet takes to get from A to B, measured in milliseconds. Distinct from bandwidth, which is how much can travel at once.; Why it matters: Bandwidth is the width of the road; latency is the speed limit. Adding lanes doesn't make the journey shorter — which is why 'buy more bandwidth' often fails to fix a slow application.

M

MFAMulti-Factor AuthenticationSecurity: Requiring more than a password — typically a code, an app prompt or a hardware key.; Why it matters: It's the highest-value security change available relative to effort. A stolen password alone stops being enough.
MPLSMultiprotocol Label SwitchingConnectivity: A private wide-area network technology that carries traffic between your sites across the provider's network rather than the public internet, with defined performance classes.; Why it matters: It's how you make voice quality contractual rather than hopeful, and how you demonstrate to an auditor that inter-site traffic never touched the public internet.; Related service

N

NAS vs SANInfrastructure: NAS serves files over the network (SMB, NFS). SAN serves raw block storage (iSCSI, Fibre Channel) that a server treats as a local disk.; Why it matters: NAS for file shares — simpler and cheaper. SAN under virtualisation and databases where latency matters. Buying the wrong one is expensive to unwind.; Related service
Network segmentationSecurity: Deliberately dividing a network into zones with policy between them, so a problem in one area stays there.; Why it matters: Perimeter security assumes attacks come from outside. Segmentation is what limits the damage when something already inside goes wrong — which is the more common case.; Related service
NGFWNext-Generation FirewallSecurity: A firewall that additionally identifies applications, inspects content for threats, and can decrypt TLS to see inside encrypted traffic.; Why it matters: Its throughput with inspection enabled is often a fraction of its headline figure. Size on the inspected number or you'll buy something that becomes the bottleneck.

O

OTDROptical Time-Domain ReflectometerCabling: Test equipment that measures loss along a fiber and locates faults, splices and bends by distance.; Why it matters: The OTDR trace taken at handover is your baseline. Without it you can't prove a fault two years later wasn't present on day one — always ask for the traces, not a pass/fail summary.

P

Packet lossNetworking: Packets that never arrive. Web traffic retransmits and recovers; real-time voice and video can't, so the audio simply drops.; Why it matters: Even 1% loss is audible on a call. It's usually the actual cause when 'the internet is fine but the phones are bad'.
Path diversityConnectivity: Two circuits that follow genuinely different physical routes — not just two contracts with different providers.; Why it matters: Two providers frequently share the same duct into your building. One digger then takes out both. Diversity is a physical property, not a commercial one.
PoEPower over EthernetCabling: Delivering electrical power over the same network cable that carries data, so phones, cameras and access points need no separate power supply.; Why it matters: Switch PoE budget is routinely under-specified. Thirty devices needing 25 W each is 750 W — well beyond many switches, and it fails only once everything is plugged in.

Q

QoSQuality of ServiceNetworking: Rules that prioritise some traffic over others, so voice gets served before a file upload when the link is busy.; Why it matters: QoS does nothing until the link saturates — and then it's the only thing keeping your calls usable. It's why a bigger circuit doesn't fix bad call quality.; Related service

R

RAIDRedundant Array of Independent DisksInfrastructure: Combining multiple disks so the array survives one or more drive failures without data loss.; Why it matters: RAID is not a backup, and believing otherwise is the most expensive misconception in storage. It survives disk failure — not deletion, ransomware, corruption or fire.; Related service
RPO / RTORecovery Point / Recovery Time ObjectiveInfrastructure: RPO is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. RTO is how long you can afford to be down.; Why it matters: These two numbers determine your entire backup and DR design, and most organisations have never been asked them. Answer them before anyone quotes you a solution.; Related service

S

SD-WANSoftware-Defined Wide Area NetworkNetworking: An intelligent overlay that runs across whatever links you already have — fiber, broadband, 4G — and picks the best path per application in real time.; Why it matters: It turns a fiber cut from an outage into a blip, because sessions move to the backup path in under a second without dropping calls.; Related service
SIP trunkVoice: A voice service delivered over your internet connection instead of physical phone lines, provisioned as a number of concurrent call channels.; Why it matters: You buy concurrent channels, not lines. Ten channels means ten simultaneous calls regardless of how many phones or numbers you have.; Related service
SLAService Level AgreementConnectivity: A contract defining guaranteed availability, response times and the credits owed if the provider misses them.; Why it matters: An SLA without credits is a statement of intent. The number that matters is what happens when they miss it — and 99.9% versus 99.99% is the difference between about 8 hours and about 52 minutes of permitted downtime a year.
Structured cablingCabling: A designed, standards-based cabling system — containment, runs, patch panels and labelling — rather than cables added one at a time as needed.; Why it matters: It's the part nobody sees and everything depends on. Poorly done, it produces intermittent faults that get blamed on everything else for years.; Related service

U

Uptime percentageConnectivity: The proportion of time a service is available. Each additional nine cuts allowed downtime by roughly a factor of ten.; Why it matters: 99% sounds excellent and permits over three days of outage a year. 99.9% permits about 8.8 hours. Read the nines carefully — they're not decoration.

V

VDIVirtual Desktop InfrastructureInfrastructure: Desktops that run in the data centre and are streamed to whatever endpoint the user has.; Why it matters: It rarely saves money on hardware. It saves on management and security posture — and it makes a lost laptop cost only the laptop.; Related service
VirtualisationInfrastructure: Running several independent virtual machines on one physical server, each behaving as its own computer.; Why it matters: The real gain isn't utilisation — it's snapshots before changes, whole-machine backups, and moving a workload off failing hardware without an outage.; Related service
VLANVirtual Local Area NetworkNetworking: A way of splitting one physical network into several logically separate ones, so devices in different VLANs can't reach each other without passing a control point.; Why it matters: It's the cheapest security control you own. Cameras, guest Wi-Fi and payment terminals sharing one flat network is how a single compromised laptop reaches everything.; Related service
VoIPVoice over IPVoice: Carrying phone calls as data over a network rather than over the traditional telephone system.; Why it matters: Call quality is entirely a network property. About 87 kbps per concurrent call on G.711, and it needs QoS — otherwise it will expose every weakness your connection has.; Related service
VPNVirtual Private NetworkSecurity: An encrypted tunnel across an untrusted network — either joining two sites permanently, or letting an individual reach the office from elsewhere.; Why it matters: Encryption throughput is usually far below routing throughput on the same hardware. It's the specification people forget to check, and the usual reason a VPN feels slow.; Related service

W

WANWide Area NetworkNetworking: The network connecting your separate sites to each other, across whatever transport carries it.; Why it matters: WAN design decisions — topology, where internet breaks out, how failover behaves — are architectural and expensive to reverse. Design before you buy circuits.; Related service

Z

Zero trustSecurity: A model that stops treating 'inside the network' as trusted. Every request is authenticated and authorised regardless of origin.; Why it matters: It's a direction of travel rather than a product, and anyone selling you 'a zero trust' is overselling. Segmentation and strong identity are the practical first steps.

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Every termon your quote, explained.

A

C

D

F

I

J

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

U

V

W

Z

Still not sure what you're being sold?

Every termon your quote, explained.

A

C

D

F

I

J

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

U

V

W

Z

Still not sure what you're being sold?

Every term
on your quote, explained.

Every term
on your quote, explained.