What Internet Speed Does My Business Need?

Is it time to upgrade your internet speeds? For business owners, fast, reliable internet is a crucial piece of the puzzle to running any successful operation. But should you invest in 1Gbps for your business?

Remember back in the day when we had to wait hours—or even days— just for a song to download, only for it to be a recording of the wrong track? Since the internet launched in 1993, internet speeds have come a long way. Twenty-seven years ago, who would have thought that 2020 would include everyone working from their homes and still accomplishing their goals? With options like IoT, the business cloud and fiber internet, most of us can probably agree that no one misses waiting for a web page to load. 

As the 2000s carried on, the first fiber broadband services emerged. We were welcomed with open arms into the era of ultrafast internet, the doors of cloud computing opened, and we had connection speeds up to 2000 times faster than the original dialups. Businesses could finally access and run IT services in remote data centers instead of on-site servers. 

How much internet speed does my business need?

Picking the right internet speed is crucial for tasks like quickly downloading files, staying connected with customers, fostering employee engagement, and nurturing business relationships – to name a few. Naturally, the larger your employee base, the more you’ll need a faster internet plan. Legacy networks like cable and DSL have data limits, and they’re not recognized as the most reliable. They’re also shared with non-business customers, like your next-door neighbor watching Netflix or the kid down the street playing Xbox. 

We’ve finally entered the age of gigabit internet. This is the new standard for business-class internet connection speeds. One gigabit per second (1Gbps) is ten times faster than 100Mbps. 1Gbps is becoming increasingly commonplace for businesses seeking premium performance.

To calculate your business’s required network bandwidth, consider the number of simultaneous internet-enabled devices connected to your network. Cloud and hybrid cloud computing also raise the issue of internet speeds; do your employees send and receive files using cloud computing? Perhaps instead of running bulky business management software programs from your own servers, you run them as SaaS cloud services to access the tools and desktops you need. With business cloud computing, it’s all about generating and communicating data as well as using it. 

What do your core business systems rely on a stable internet connection to do? Presumably, make sales, interact with consumers, file records and then some. 

For a business some of the common demands on internet and how much speed you need to do that activity is listed below.  The interesting piece of this for businesses is that so much of these activities require high upload and download speeds.  That is where Fiber can play a crucial role in optimizing your business by providing the same download speeds as upload.

• Point of Sale (POS) – On average, at least 512Kbps upload and download bandwidth for each point of sale device.

• Web-based Organizational Tools (like QuickBooks, Slack, Monday, Asana) – Let’s say you have a peer-to-peer video call over an online communication tool like ones mentioned above. Video calling between two people consumes up to 270MB for one hour. If three participants join a video call, it consumes up to 900MB. Five participants and above consumes up to 1.8GB for one hour.
• Live Streaming – Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube make it easy for businesses to connect instantly with their consumers. Let’s look at Facebook, for example. For a video with 720p resolution at 30 or 60 frames per second, they recommend having an upload speed of roughly 3 to 4 Mbps.
• Video Conferencing – More businesses are relying on platforms like Skype and Zoom to conduct socially distanced work meetings. Skype’s download/upload speed for a group video with five people is 4Mbps. If a video call has more than seven participants, it jumps to 8Mbps. 

Business-class 1Gbps dedicated fiber internet access is designed to accommodate businesses of all sizes. It provides equal download and upload speeds. 1Gbps is 1000Mbps, or 1000 Megabits per second, which is really fast. Business owners worldwide are relying on the internet to run their organization successfully in our heavily digitalized world. 

Reliable internet is absolutely critical to business operations today. You rely on your internet connection to make everything run smoothly; sophisticated platforms take some serious power. To guarantee maximum, glitch-free performance, you need substantial speed and bandwidth to spare.