Many of us will be experiencing slower overall speeds in the wake of the pandemic. This is primarily due to the swath of people who are going online for work, leisure and study. This increased activity could be resulting in downtime and interrupted services.

This can be very frustrating when you are on an important video call and your internet is slow and keeps dropping – you can’t hear what is being said, you cannot get your video working and what should have been a 30-minute call has now taken over an hour!!!! – it can really affect both productivity and morale.

So, what type of connection do you need?

Most of the work that we tend to do is actually fairly lightweight when talking data and how much we are using on a broadband network. Sending and receiving emails, database updates, replying to online chat messages, writing reports, filling in forms and answering calls are all day to day office tasks that can be conducted on the slowest broadband to some degree.

This is however changing, with more and more of us now doing video conference calls with clients, suppliers and colleagues. The need for better upload speeds in particular is becoming necessary.

For example, one of our clients was doing a Management meeting with six colleagues streaming both video and voice and unfortunately, his home broadband connection just could not handle the capacity. After becoming increasingly agitated he has since upgraded to a managed internet service with a business-grade firewall and router within his home and now has no issues.

Solutions

It isn’t necessarily the speed of the connection but more to do with the overall quality, a business connection has reduced latency and contention.

Latency measures the time it takes between your actions and the response between your computer, the internet, and everything in between.

Contention Ratio (or oversubscription ratio) is the number of users sharing the same data capacity. The lower the contention ratio the higher the quality of service.

Reliability is also a key thing to consider. What is the SLA provided by the network? If the connection goes down how long will it take for them to get you back up and running?

If you can have a business connection that is delivered separately to the home service this not only improves productivity but also presents a secure network that doesn’t have household traffic.

Children are using the internet for education as well as everything else they do, the home network would be quiet during business hours as the children would be in school, with us facing the prospect of children not being in school for the next three months it makes absolute sense to separate that domestic traffic from the business.

For more information or advice please speak to one of our team today.