Another rule of thumb is to look at your company’s average speed and then double it - you want 50% more speed available to handle bursts. For example, a 50-user company using Office 365 and Salesforce should have an aggregate of 75 Mbps of internet bandwidth while companies whose employees use the internet for email and web browsing only need much less. For companies leveraging the cloud, as a rule of thumb, you need roughly 1.5 Mbps per employee. STEP 4: Determine if your slow network is caused by latency or bandwidth issuesīandwidth: If you’re routinely hitting your SLA’s max bandwidth, you don’t have enough capacity to cover the times you need to push more packets through the pipeline (bursts). If they are making good on your SLA, then you need to do more troubleshooting. And it’s much easier to get your ISP to hold up their end of the bargain of the SLA when you have the data in hand. If your ISP isn’t living up to your agreement, you need to contact your ISP. STEP 3: Compare what you’re using to what you’re paying for They’ll collect data from your firewall or router and can also contact your ISP for a report. STEP 2: Measure the speed of your networkĪsk your IT department to report on the throughput you’re actually getting. The problem could be with bandwidth, latency, or a combination of the two (or even other reasons). However, just because you have slow internet does not mean that you do not have enough bandwidth. If you’re routinely using more than 80% of the available bandwidth, you will be getting complaints. The most common protocols include OSPF (Open Shortest Path First, which finds the shortest route), BGP (Border Gateway Protocol, which dynamically updates routes), RIP (Routing Information Protocol, which shares information about shortest known routes), and Cisco’s older proprietary IGRP and EIGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol and Enhanced IGRP).ĭeciphering speed for your business networkĪre your customers or employees complaining? If your company is using less than 80% of your available internet bandwidth, it’s probably good enough to keep everyone happy.
Routing protocol (warning - geek alert): Determines how routers communicate with one another. Service Level Agreement (SLA): Contract between an ISP and an end-user that defines the expected level of service. ISPs include companies like Comcast, AT&T, Google, Verizon, and smaller or local carriers. Routing: The process of selecting a path for traffic in a network, or between or across multiple networks. Internet congestion typically happens at peering points (like cars on an interstate’s on- and off-ramps). Peering is when internet carriers buy connections from each other to route traffic to destinations or from destinations not directly connected to the network. The internet is comprised of many different companies all connecting to each other.
Peering: No one carrier owns the entire internet. This varies due to distance (geography), congestion, filters and other circumstances and is represented by the number of ms (milliseconds) when you test your Internet speed. Latency: How long it takes your data to make it to its destination. Higher Mbps means more data.īroadband: High-speed internet with a minimum download speed or 25 Mbps and a minimum upload speed of 3 Mbps. Mbps: “Megabits per second” is the unit used for measuring how much data (packets) are being transferred per second. The greater your bandwidth, the more packets you can send at one time. Packet loss is when some packets don’t get where they’re going so you get jittery or inconsistent performance.īandwidth: The maximum (width) or capacity of your connection (highway). You need all the pieces on the receiving end to understand the message being sent. They travel on the information highway as small pieces of a puzzle. Packets: Small pieces of information (data) on the web that contain the text, images, and video you experience on your device.
Here’s what you need to know: Quick review of the lingoīroadband: A broad (wide) band of frequencies that allow many different types of traffic to be sent or received at the same time - voice, video, data, and TV all on the same connection. The company needs enough bandwidth and the appropriate routing protocols to handle the extra internet traffic to and from their servers, and employees working remotely need to have fast enough internet at their locations to stay productive. Speed comes into play differently when a significant portion of an organization’s staff is working remotely. But how much internet speed do you need? And is speed the only thing that keeps your internet hopping along? We’re all relying on the internet more than ever - the last thing you need is for your connection to slow you down.