Improving your business internet isn’t rocket science – in fact there are some fantastically simple things you can do today to make it faster and more reliable.
One of our business internet experts, James Fell, came up with these surprisingly effective fixes. Linda is a Solway Comms Sales Manager, and she is available to help you find the perfect internet connection for your business.
In the meantime, here are his top tips, which focus on knowing your users, your network, and how you use the internet.
We went into a little more detail than normal, but it was worth it…
Everybody may not have the same requirement so give priority to the thing that matter
The speed you buy is not the speed that everyone will see. If you buy 20Mbps but have 30 users each needing 7Mbps constantly, “you’re going to have a bad time”.
If you have an CAD user for instance, uploading and downloading complex designs, who genuinely needs more speed than others, don’t be afraid to limit everyone else.
Imagine you have a 50Mbps connection, and have 11 employees online at once. Even if you only have one power user and everyone else is simply checking incoming emails and sending out quotes, everybody is going to drawing the connection away from those who need it.
So if your main user needs 20Mbps, you can actually give them 25Mbps and limit everyone else to 2.5Mbps.
Don’t directly enforce the above example, you need to know what is happening on your connection.
Your users have different requirements and they may even have different devices. You can give someone 100Mbps but if their device can only handle 50Mbps, you’re throwing money away.
Your old devices (even just 12 months) are slowing you down
You need to keep up to date with the product lifecycle, and as a rule of thimb itt’s estimated that upload and download speed requirements double about every 12 months. Advancements in computer processing power is only around 18 months however, meaning your equipment could be slowing you down.
Quite often when you experience slow speeds, your connection will be fine but your devices are what is slowing you down.
Sometimes it may even simply be a software update, either because one is needed or it is already in progress in the background.
Mini technology tip – If you’ve got a good enough connection you’ve probably decided to save money on your phonelines by switching VoIP (IP Telephony). Make sure you prioritise a portion of the connection for this too!
Know who needs access to what online and when. You may do this already, either you switch off social media entirely or have a period of time in the day when everyone can access it.
Let’s say you work in a car showroom and your sales people need to post videos on social media for a pitch but the only time they can access it is lunchtime. Because you’re a great place to work you open this up to everyone on their lunch break. Everyone takes advantage of this but it means that the internet goes so slow that they can’t upload any content.
Here’s two solutions to the problem:
1) Make sure you have good upload speeds to start
2) Again, limit how much speed certain users have you may even want to split the connection entirely and have separate connection logins for your sales team.
Who do you allow to connect to your network? If you have Wi-Fi and let just anyone login when they’re there, they will – phones, tablets, laptops and more.
The temptation for hotels and restaurant s and want your guests to get online, great, you give them the Wi-Fi password.
However, they connect once and are online forever. Maybe they regularly attend meetings there and most of the time don’t even need to connect but because they did previously, they’re in. Simply being online is drawing the connection from you and your other guests.
In this day and age the performance of the internet is ever more important to this type of establishment.
The first thing you’ll want to do is split off an entirely separate Wi-Fi connection, just for your guests.
From here, you can decide how they login (make sure you’re capturing those emails if you want to keep them updated on new services and offers), a time frame in which they can be connected (12, 24, 48 hours) before they need to login again, what they can access and how much speed they can use.
When it comes to devices, buying cheap generally isn’t worth the saving, especially when it comes to Wi-Fi. To ensure all your users have the best experience you ultimately need to connect devices via cable wherever possible.
Having a direct connection to the internet router will give the best performance but coming back to the product lifecycle, if your router is 15 years old then it won’t matter how fast the internet is in reality,
You might not think about your router too often but you should, because an old router makes for a slow connection.
With Wi-Fi, it’s a simple fact that the further away your are from the access point, the slower it will be and as you’re further away, the connection will be working harder to get you the speed you need.
The simple solution would be to introduce a range extender, this might work great for one, maybe two locations but are often more of a burden. Firstly, you assume that the speed achieved will be half of what is coming in and second, it can be impacted by the same factors affected the main point and could be more susceptible to interference.
This might seem counter intuitive, the thought of having to start using more internet to say edit documents online that were previously done offline. (Cloud computing basically means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.)
However cloud computing can help you speed up and improve your connection. Take your website for example. If you’re hosting this in house you need to always be online, drawing the connection from the office, and if you store this off-site in a datacentre there are plenty of advantages.
First of all, you’re only using the website to upload any changes that you’ll have already prepared. You’ll save money on this and the power previously used for your server. Your website will always be online, if when you’re not.
Your users will be able to access and edit, wherever they are in the world (providing they have an internet connection). So even in adverse weather conditions, they can still gain access.
If you run a business in our coverage area, we can probably improve your business broadband experience. We already work with a host of respected local businesses like Story Homes, David Allen and Bell Park Kerridge, and you can join them by giving our team a call today.
