ASUS Business Hub

Following our recent article on Why Your Internet Setup is Failing Your Business, it’s now worth thinking about how fast your business connection needs to be. After all, a small business selling physical products primarily to in-store customers likely won’t need the same level of connectivity an enterprise business needs for all its office staff. So how fast does your internet need to be?

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Committing to a Contract

Before choosing a service provider and committing to a contract, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my usage? Do I use the internet for simple searches, data entry, and similar functions? Or does my business tend to perform a lot of intensive application usage, media and data transfers, and use lots of different communication tools?
• How many people are accessing the internet at once? Is it just a few people or entire teams and departments?
• Are staff accessing the internet solely through company devices or are they also connecting via smartphones, tablets, and other secondary devices?
• Does my business have peaks in usage? Or is business usage consistently high month-to-month?

It’s questions such as these that will afford you a good understanding on how much bandwidth your business uses, and what level of speeds and connectivity you’re going to need, particularly if your business is experiencing a period of rapid growth.

Sole Traders and Micro Businesses: Less is More

As a sole trader or groups up to five staff, there’s no need to invest in large-scale connectivity. Unless your use-case simply demands the highest possible speeds, 500 Mbps or above isn’t going to provide tangible benefits to your business bottom line. If you’re working solo, a connection up to 75 Mbps is more than enough for most use-cases. If you’re simply accessing online platforms, checking your business social media, and updating financial records, you’ll be satisfied with 25 Mbps speeds. For slightly larger groups, it again depends on each staff member’s needs. 150 Mbps should be sufficient in most scenarios, but if your team is doing a lot of visual and media-intensive work, it’s worth looking to the Small to Medium Business recommendations found below.

Small to Medium Businesses: Cost-Saving on Connectivity

Small businesses typically have a much smaller staff, though their usage might remain high. For example, a small advertising or marketing agency might not have a large staff, but they may access graphics, media files, download assets from client sources, and more, all of which requires high-speed access in order to download, upload, and consistently access these files. For small businesses, take the time to consider how you use the internet. As previously mentioned, you may not need high speeds if all your business is doing is performing simple data entry tasks, accessing the web for searches and social media, and other simple operations. For this level of internet demand, a connection of 75 Mbps or less is more than adequate. When it comes to small businesses who perform a lot of their regular business operations online, such as the aforementioned marketing agencies, it’s worth investing in connection speeds up to 500 Mbps and perhaps more. This level of connectivity affords your business not only fast speeds, but depending on how many employees you have, allows everyone to connect simultaneously without slowing workflows to a crawl.

Enterprise Business: High Demand Requires Maximum Connectivity

Enterprise businesses are typically made up of hundreds of employees and a variety of demands. Whole departments such as sales and marketing, along with creative departments, may use more than their fair share of the company’s connection. For such use-cases, speeds of 1 Gbps or above are not uncommon, and may even require multiple gigabit connections if one installation isn’t sufficient.   Maximise your internet connectivity with ASUS networking devices.