Slow internet could be slowing your company’s growth

Why slow internet hurts

The Internet is nothing more than a finite series of connections. The more data you try to cram into a limited amount of space, the more overcrowded they become. During your peak business hours, you likely experience data slowdowns, which affect how productive your employees are. When you’re waiting for pages to load and servers to respond, you can’t do much else.

If your employees view an average of 200 websites per day — whether cloud databases or vendor service pages — a 10-second wait translates into 30 minutes of lost productivity every day. That’s 2.5 hours of lost time every week. In an organization that employs 20 people, this translates to 50 hours — more than the worth of a full-time employee.

Faster Internet connections alleviate productivity issues by ensuring that pages, cloud services, and everything your employees need to work is available regardless of the time of day. Finally, and most importantly, improving bandwidth means customer wait times are kept to a minimum, a vital key performance indicator in a customer-facing environment.

The Problem With Download and Upload Speeds

Acording to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), the average download speed in Canada is 18.64mbps. If this figure seems high, that’s because it’s skewed toward individual Internet connections. Without a business connection, a company with 20 employees using the Internet would get approximately 0.93mbps per user. Compare that with the numerous tiers offered by our trusted partner, Shaw Business, which offers plans ranging from 20mpbs all the way up to 1,000mbps. Here are some examples of how easily a consumer-level internet connection can be used up:

• Watching a streaming HD video, such as a training or informational video, requires upwards of 5mbps. Four employees is all it would take to burn through your downloading bandwidth.
• Video conference calling, such as Skype, requires around 2mbps upload to manage a high-quality call. With the average upload speed in Canada pegged at just over 7mbps, four employees will leave you high and dry.

If your bandwidth is forcing you to restrict what employees can do, you can bet productivity, communication, and creativity are all going to take a serious hit. And in a small business, those are three critical variables for success. In many cases, this leads to frustration, and in extreme cases, it can lead to employee dissatisfaction as they are being asked to work with tools that are inadequate for the job.

Expand and grow

So bandwidth is finite, and it limits my company’s operating capacity — what do I do? You need to take a hard look at whether or not your Internet solution is the right one for you. That might mean simply upgrading your connection speed, or it might take the form of a managed Internet solution. In the latter, we help you increase bandwidth in 1.5-mbps increments so you’re always paying for exactly what you need and not a kilobyte more. In addition to bandwidth management, your hardware needs may also change. Our program covers routers, network switches, point-of-sale processors, card readers, and so on.

Upgrading your Internet means that you can provide better customer experiences, get more work done, and take on more capacity at a moment’s notice. With Dyrand Systems as your managed services provider, your Internet connection goes from a painful bottleneck to a well-oiled thoroughfare.

It would be crazy to assume that your Internet will stay the same over the next financial quarter. Cloud service adoption is through the roof and remote work is more prevalent than ever. If you’re not actively managing and monitoring your Internet bandwidth usage, you have little chance of competing with better equipped competitors. Talk to us today to see how we can boost your business with a faster, more capable Internet connection.