Is Your Organisation's Wireless Becoming A Bottleneck?

Are things running a little bit slower than you expect when you are on your organisation's wireless network?  As connections to the internet have sped up, so has wireless technology, but a lot of organisations are still using older wireless networks, they work, so why upgrade them?

Why is this?

The primary reason is speed, if you have a bottleneck in your organisation it impacts productivity, maybe for a few, maybe for many, the thing is though, a lot of old wireless networks now work slower than using the internet on a mobile phone.

Traditionally the connection to the internet has been the bottleneck in a network, with internet connections being contended and slow, and have always been the slowest part of any network, however with the roll out of fibre internet connections across the UK, this is often no longer the case. 

Fibre internet connections are providing much faster connections both to homes and businesses alike, with people often having gigabit internet connectivity, which then goes on to highlight bottlenecks elsewhere in the network, most commonly older wireless networks.

There is an old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", however even if something is working, it may now be of diminishing value and it may be time to invest in newer technology to get the benefit of faster network speeds.

More and more businesses are moving their data to being online, stored in online cloud storage, so accessing data is really vulnerable to latency, the longer it takes the more obvious it is. 

Cloud based services are more prevalent as are things like online meetings using Microsoft Teams or Zoom or other providers.  These require significant bandwidth and sometimes it is pretty obvious which clients suffer from slower connectivity with blocky images and jitter on the calls.

Ironically we have had instances where an organisation had staff who found it far more productive to work from home where their network was newer and faster than in the organisation, that was using an older wireless network.  Whilst the organisation had a fast fibre internet connection, it still relied on an old, slow wireless which was the pinch point, meaning that staff connecting to the wireless networks had a far slower work experience than they were expecting.

What can you do about it?

Upgrading the wireless to new equipment that supports multiple antennas and wireless protocols 6 & 7 and tri-band wireless networks experiencing speeds of up to 11Gbps, taking the wireless network from being the slowest part of an organisations network, to being part of the fastest parts of the network.

Staff will experience a far better connection, with modern wireless being able to process faster connections and a much greater bandwidth of data transfer, allowing staff to concurrently work and all having the same, improved experience. 

Why do it? 

Predominantly it is as simple as the business bottom line, by improving staff productivity.  Why curb your staff's productivity with older infrastructure that takes a lot longer to load their data when they could benefit from faster connectivity, allowing them to open documents faster and be more productive.   

As an example let's say over time, each person using wireless saves 10 minutes per day of additional time they can be productive because they are no longer waiting or wasting time for things to load.  That adds up to 50 minutes per week, almost an hour of reclaimed time where staff are more productive.   

Then lets expand on this, staff typically work for approx 45 weeks per year (if you factor in holiday, bank holidays, sick days etc) so you would soon realise 2,250 of additional minutes of productivity for one person in a year, or roughly an extra 4 - 5 days of productivity, just from one member of staff.  

How much do you pay your staff, wouldn't it be good to get an extra week of work per year from them?

If your organisation has 50 members of staff, that could equate to getting approx 234 additional days of productivity back from your staff, which is the equivalent of having one more person working for the business.

How much would it cost to employ 1 new member of staff, then compare that to the cost of upgrading the wireless network for at most, a few thousand pounds.  I know which I would do because it is more cost effective.

In our example, we have used 10 minutes per day of increased productivity just to make the maths simple, however it is often a significantly higher number that businesses experience, with a huge uplift in performance and productivity, with staff being able to open and save large documents significantly quicker than they could before.  

It is basic business sense to invest in providing your staff with a better performing network to boost their productivity, why pay for more staff when you can help get more from your existing headcount?   Why hinder your staff, why hold them back with old kit, a small investment will return significant productivity boost within your organisation, a small investment to dramatically increase productivity. 

Call us on 01722 411 999  to find out more about the latest wireless networks to help improve the user's work experience and boost your organisations productivity.