The speed of your broadband can massively affect the productivity of your business overall. Who wants to wait around for ages while pages load and documents download? You need to make sure that you have a good broadband speed in place across your office so that you and your employees are able to deliver your tasks successfully. Let’s take a closer look at what a good speed for broadband is, and some of the factors that might affect it.
What is broadband speed?
Broadband itself is the internet connection that allows you to access and interact with the online world. With so much of modern business taking place online in some capacity, it is vital that companies are able to get a good speed for broadband.
It has its own measuring system with units of Megabits per second (Mbps) or Kilobits per second (Kbps). This is a scale of how fast data is transferred online. Whenever you do something like open a webpage or send an email, the transfer of data that supports this action is bandwidth. The higher your broadband speed, the faster actions will happen.
To improve your broadband speed, you need to understand what you currently receive. Our broadband speed checker will help you measure your current speeds to help determine whether or not you should make a change.
What factors can affect the speed of your broadband?
If you think that you used to have a good speed for broadband but it has got noticeably worse throughout the years, there might be several reasons for this. There are multiple factors that can affect broadband speeds, and so you need to determine which ones are relative to your business.
One of the major factors that will affect the speed of a business’s broadband is the number of devices connected to the internet. In even a small business of 10 employees or less, every one of those employees will have a computer and a phone that is connected to the Wi-Fi. It has to be able to handle everyone sending emails, accessing websites, hopping on conference calls, and all of the operations that make for a smooth business.
Another major factor that you have to consider is the type of connection that is open to you. Standard broadband is widely available throughout the UK, and this uses the Openreach copper network and ADSL technology. While this is the standard connection in many homes, it is not always suitable for businesses as the average download speed is only about 10-11 Mbps.
Faster options are usually covered by fibre connections. Fibre broadband will be a fibre connection to your local cabinet, and then a regular phone line into your premises. If you instead opt for full fibre, you can get a strong superfast broadband connection directly into your office.
What is a good speed for broadband?
So, what is a good speed for broadband? It does depend on the size of your business and the operations that you wish to undertake. If you have a busier office with a lot of connections and activity, it will be better to opt for a connection that will give you those higher speeds. Likewise, if your business is smaller and never has much in the way of internet activity, you could consider a lower speed as it does come with a lower cost.
Let’s start with an office of about 10 employees. This might have about 10 to 15 devices connected to the Wi-Fi, meaning that you ideally want 150 Mbps download speed, and an upload speed of 29 Mbps. This will allow you to tap into video conferencing without buffering or blur and giving speedy access to cloud computing solutions.
For slightly larger offices, there might be 20 to 30 devices connected. Such an office could require a lot of work in the cloud, online back-ups, and multiple other heavy-duty operations that will cause a drain on bandwidth. A good speed for broadband for an office of this size will usually be about 300 Mbps download with a 48 Mbps upload. There are plenty of levels above this too, so regardless of the size of office you have, there will be a solution for you!
Upgrade your broadband speed with Omnitel
Are you in need of an overhaul of your broadband systems? Get in touch with our team at Omnitel today. Our experts will be able to assess your current system and needs and make recommendations to help improve your current speeds. No matter how many devices you have to connect to your system or the size of your business overall, we will be able to help you get the right broadband connection to facilitate the needs of your company. Contact us today to find out more.
