Internet for Your Business – 5 Things to Consider

We live in a connected world. Your business, and your team, can often only work as fast as your Internet connection. And while it’s usually a sound practice to keep operating costs down wherever possible, opting for an Internet service plan that doesn’t provide the speed or bandwidth your business needs may end up leaving you with more headaches than it solves.

We’ve all been there – stuck waiting for a website to display, an e-mail attachment to download or a streaming video to play without those annoying hang-ups. As a consumer, slow Internet service is a nuisance. In a business, it can cost you time, which equals money. When deciding on the ideal service plan to ensure the best connectivity for your business, it’s important to be thinking about your immediate and long term needs.

So how can you figure out what sort of Internet plan you’ll need? Well, a good place to start is by considering how your plan stacks up according to key metrics. Be sure to evaluate the combination of download and upload speeds, which can impact how long it takes for that big email attachment to be received or sent. Your bandwidth cap is also important – how much data can you send or receive (usually per month) before going over the limit in your service plan?

And with those metrics in mind, here are five things to consider when selecting the proper Internet service plan for your business:

Slow internet can cause productivity losses. Let’s be frank – a single slow email download isn’t the end of the world, or even your workday. But if the business’s connection speed is slow, it isn’t just one message, and it isn’t only email. Every connection via the Internet to send or receive data will suffer from the delay. Depending on how large your team is and how much their jobs require them to be connected, those lost seconds add up to lost minutes and lost hours.

The data we share is getting fatter. The amount of data we share, and the size of it, is constantly increasing. This has significant implications for your business, especially if you’re on an Internet service plan that doesn’t offer you enough bandwidth or isn’t fast enough to keep up.

Every new hire adds to the load on your service plan. Do you expect your business to grow? If so, consider that every new team member represents an added load on your service plan.

Mobility is often a necessity. More and more, teams are becoming mobile. Teleworking is growing in popularity. So too are cloud-based productivity tools, such as Microsoft Office 365. Employees are no longer just working with each other behind the firewall, sharing and collaborating on documents that are housed on a local server. But this freedom demands lots of bandwidth, not just with the “broadband pipe” that connects your office to the Internet, but also with the data plans for your team’s mobile devices.

Overage costs are often a risk with entry-level service plans. It isn’t only about the productivity drag of a slow Internet connection. Don’t lose sight of that monthly bandwidth cap. If you don’t have an internet plan with high or unlimited usage, overage charges could potentially surpass the cost of upgrading to a faster Internet service plan with a greater bandwidth allowance.

The bottom line
When choosing an Internet service plan, it’s important to consider your current and future needs. Select the right plan and you’ll be future proofing your business to be ready for growth, changes in how your team manages workflow, and how data moves between your business, your partners and your customers.

What type of Internet package do you have for your business? Let us know in the comments section below.