A. Colocation is the term describing the siting of a client's IT hardware in a datacentre.  The client continues to own the hardware and is effectively renting space, along with the associated power, cooling and Internet connectivity, in which to site the hardware.

A. Most business broadband providers only state the downstream connection speed (typically 8Mb/s to 24Mb/s) rather than the far slower upstream connection speed (typically 0.5Mb/s to 0.8Mb/s).  To give this some context, even in the very rare situations where the advertised speeds are reached the downstream and upstream connections are still 43 and 1280 times slower respectively than a modern office network.  Exacerbating this, is the fact that if a user in one office wishes to download a file from a second office, it is the second office's upstream connection that becomes the bottleneck.  Combine this with typical broadband performance, contention between different subscribers and mulitple users and it is not unusual to see opening even a small Microsoft Word or Excel document take several minutes.

A. Datacentres typically offer Internet connections that are far faster and have symmetrical upload and download when compared to business broadband.  This can immediately deliver far superior performance, both if operating some kind of remote desktop service - for example Citrix, Terminal Services or VMware VDI - or for simple file sharing and email access.  This can be coupled with WAN optimisation solutions to give further gains in performance.