Slow Internet At Your Business?

Use these three tips to get the most out of your bandwidth!

1. Find out if anyone at the office is in the habit of streaming movies, music, and TV shows during working hours

Maybe some people in your office picked up a little Netflix-while-you-work habit during the shutdown last Spring. Streaming services like Netflix can take up a huge portion of your business’s bandwidth which could make the internet seem slow.

Take a look at how much bandwidth is used for various programs:

Your internet bandwidth should be reserved for necessary functions – such as emailing, video conferencing, work-related research, etc. When employees start to use company internet for personal reasons, this can chew up your bandwidth, leading to problems for the rest of the office. Especially if people are using bandwidth hogs like Netflix. Considering a recent study found 37% of people admitting to having watched Netflix while at work, it’s very likely that some of your bandwidth is going towards watching The Office while in the office. Here are two ways you could solve that problem.

• You can create a company policy to ban or limit the use of streaming services during the work day. Without technical reinforcement, you will be relying on the honor system.
• You can also ask your IT provider or System Administrator to use a web filtering service such as Cisco Umbrella to put restrictions on certain sites or certain categories of sites. Making Netflix and other video streaming services impossible to access on the company network can make a big difference. Additionally, your IT company or Sys Admin could leverage any modern, capable firewall to give you insight into what applications and what kind of traffic pass through your network each day. If you want, they can even configure prioritization of certain types of traffic considered critical to your operations. You could, for example, prioritize your Voice over IP phone system traffic ahead of anyone streaming music while they work.

2. Solving bandwidth issues at the Internet Service Provider level

Your organization’s System Administrator or IT company can also work with you to review your Internet Service Provider (ISP) package you are paying for. If you’re paying for 100Mbs on a consumer grade package, you’re not getting the same thing you’d get if you had selected 10Mbs on a business-grade internet package. You may be thinking, “Internet is internet, right?” You’re correct! However, there are two main differences between business internet services and consumer internet services.

First, there’s the symmetry of your connection. A consumer quality connection is asymmetrical. It will give you very fast download speeds and very slow upload speeds – which makes sense when you’re at home watching your favorite shows and browsing the web. However, at work, you’re likely working with large files while your network is running backups, and your team members are moving data in and out of the cloud throughout the workday. In this case, you need your upload speed to match your download speed. This is what we call a symmetrical connection.

Second, there’s this little thing called an SLA, or service level agreement. The ISPs are proud of these and charge accordingly, but when you own a business connected to the internet backed by an SLA, you’ll be first in line to get fixed when the internet goes down in your area. Whether it’s a storm, a flood, or an infrastructure issue, the ISPs work to get their SLA-backed connections up and running before they move on to the consumer grade internet connections. Additionally, when you have a business grade internet connection, you’ll be connected to the best infrastructure with redundancies in place that help you and your team at work to experience less degradation in quality and more uptime.

3. Maybe it's time to renegotiate or upgrade your bandwidth package

If the above methods just aren’t working, and your office internet is irreparably slow, it may be time to upgrade your package with your ISP or switch to a better ISP. It’s possible to outgrow plans as your company increases in size and complexity, and it’s probably not as expensive as you might imagine to upgrade your plan. In many cases, we’ve seen companies negotiate new rates with their existing ISP where they end up getting more bandwidth for less money! As technology continues to evolve, the cost of internet bandwidth continues to go down.

See here for more information on how an MSP like Velo IT Group can proactively partner with you to solve issues with bandwidth, slow internet, and more. If you have a current managed services partnership, we recommend asking them these 5 essential questions today!