If you’re plagued by sluggish internet, make it your 2023 mission to make improvements. It really won’t take much – your mission could be accomplished within a very short space of time leaving you to reap the benefits for the rest of the year. 

Slow internet speeds can cause one of two things – sleep or sheer anger! Either is not great for productivity or wellbeing…  

Reasons for slow internet speeds

There are a number of reasons why your internet may have slowed down and two common causes are old routers and too many users.  

Increased usage

As our reliance on the internet snowballs year on year, so too does our frustration if it doesn’t work right. In the UK 63.5 million of us use the internet, of which 46.6 million use it daily. Over 5 billion people now use the internet worldwide (this has risen from 4 billion just 4 years ago). Alongside this is the amount of time we spend on the internet with the average user spending roughly 6 hours per day (that’s one third of their waking lives) using internet-powered devices!   

And it’s not as if we’re using just one device at a time… how often do we find ourselves using our PC and phone simultaneously?  

This vast expansion in internet usage has inevitably required some pretty hefty increases in the supporting infrastructure. International organisations have immense data centres, the UK alone housing 456! 

But what, we hear you say, does this have to do with me? Well, if you and your team have increased your internet usage without updating your routers or WiFi allocation then you could be heading (very slowly) into the equivalent of an internet death zone…  

What to do

Never fear! All is not lost! You can stop banging your head against the keyboard. Replacing routers that are over 5 years old will have an extremely positive impact on internet speeds. These will be significantly more powerful than older models, catering for current requirements. Routers allow network segregation, so you can apply different WiFi allocations to different segments, giving increased allocation to the areas of the business that are the most dependent upon the internet. An added advantage of segmenting your network is increased security by ensuring that private individuals are not tapping into the same server space as business users.  

Remote workers 

Since writing a similar blog in 2018 working practices have changed dramatically. Yes, your office-based routers will need be up to date, but you also now need to consider your remote workers. Do they have adequate internet capacity within the home working environments? Hybrid working is here to stay, so if you wish your remote workers to remain productive you need to ensure their internet provision is sufficient. Additionally, check that cyber security levels are maintained wherever your workers are based on any given day. 

Get help! 

Not sure how old your router is or how to segment your network? Need to ensure your remote workers have what they need? Get in touch – we can work through this for you, speeding up your internet and allowing safe working practices. 

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