What’s Slowing Down Your Business’s Wireless Broadband Connection?

If there is one roadblock that is guaranteed to cause some degree of chaos in the office, it’s a slow or nearly non-existent Internet connection. If your business is experiencing some download or upload problems and causing your employees a lot of grief, here’s a quick guide on figuring out what the problem might be and how to solve it.

Before anything else, you need to check if your connection is actually running as fast as advertised by your Internet provider. In order to do that, you can run a test on sites such as SpeedTest.net, which will show you your upload and download rates. If you notice that your results are slower than you thought, consider the following:

Testing Your Expected Internet Speed

1. How far are you from the nearest exchange?

The farther away your business location is from your provider’s servers, the slower your connection will be because the data has to travel a farther distance. To ensure faster speeds, make sure to go with an Internet provider that has a server close to your location.

2. What is the average speed you can expect to get?

Often, the speed that providers advertise is the maximum potential, but what you actually get on a regular basis is much lower than that. To confirm, call your provider and ask for how fast you can realistically expect your connection to be.

Troubleshooting Slow Internet Connections

1. Are there are particularly large file transfers currently going on?

It should be a given, but if you are currently downloading or uploading something that is made up of thousands of megabytes, most of your connection will be hogged by that process. We are not just referring to individual file transfers, either. Some of the programs running in the background of your employees’ PCs might be sneakily using it up due to automatic downloads.

2. Are there any other devices currently connected to the Internet?

Yes, everybody’s always online, but having every single gadget hooked up to the network comes at a cost. If you have several phones, tablets, or even laptops using the same Internet connection, they will all end up using too much of the data allocated by your monthly plan. That leaves less room for your more important equipment to use. Encourage everybody at your department to turn off the wireless connections on their phones if they are not for work-related purposes to free up your router and hopefully speed things up.

We've outlined just a few of the useful questions you can ask when it comes to troubleshooting your slow connection, but there are definitely more ways you can speed up your company’s Internet. To circumvent most of these issues, make sure you've done your homework and signed up for only the best wireless broadband solution in your area. Your clients deserve only the highest quality services and products, so don’t settle for any second-rate networks, since quick access to information is crucial to the success of any business.

Hannah Jones

Author & Editor

From Skopje, Macedonia, Also works as Software Quality Assurance.