Services
Business Internet

For those less familiar with the subject, it’s understandable if internet speed is the foremost concern. After all, faster download speeds has long been the boast of many providers, and it has been a priority in the advancement of the technology. But the truth is that for businesses, having a reliable internet connection is often more important than having an incredibly fast internet connection.

Many assume that faster internet means increased productivity as users can power through heavy workloads. And this is true, to an extent. But the truth is that most businesses only need an internet speed that meets their needs – having an unbelievably quick connection stops providing much of an advantage to businesses when it’s much faster than your actual needs. Much more important is having a reliable connection.

As a business, you need a robust internet solution. When it comes to videoconferencing, VoIP, bandwidth hungry cloud-based applications, or anything else, having a superfast internet connection doesn’t matter if it isn’t reliable. Reliability and resilience should always be at the top of your priorities when looking for a business internet provider – not having a reliable connection can result in lost productivity and revenue due to periods of downtime or poor performance.

It might go without saying that, generally, bigger businesses need more bandwidth than smaller businesses. But it’s more complex than that. It essentially comes down to calculating the size of the employee base and potential number of internet users against what tasks these users are going to be using the connection for. 

Take, for example, a nationwide law firm with hundreds of employees that still takes a traditional approach, handling most duties with paper and printing – they don’t use the internet for much more than sending the occasional email. Then take a ten-man small business in the tech and digital sector who are constantly using video and audio conferencing, VoIP, cloud-based applications and are always uploading and downloading large files. 

While one business is much larger than the other, the need for internet speed does not run parallel. One is very reliant on fast connectivity while the other isn’t, and the suitability of the connection will differ. This is why it’s so important to have a clear picture of what tasks your business internet connectivity is going to be used to complete.

But it’s true that, generally speaking, the larger your business is in number of employees, the faster your internet needs to be. As mentioned above, with just two people using the internet for a download at the same time, the download speed is halved across both users. So if you have dozens or even hundreds of people relying upon the same internet connection, you’re going to need to choose a business connectivity solution that can accommodate all these users. 

Internet access and digital connectivity is a very technical and complex topic, which is why there’s a fair amount of industry specific jargon and terminology to get your head around. For those new to the subject, it can be a lot to take on and can become very confusing. That’s why we thought we’d help outline the meaning behind some of the terms and words that you’ll hear most often when researching and purchasing a new business internet solution. 

• Latency

Latency is another term that refers to the time it takes for a request to travel from the sender to the receiver and the receiver to process the request. Simply put, the round trip time from the browser to the server. If your current internet service is suffering from long delays and is processing information slowly, it can be referred to as having ‘high latency’. On the other hand, internet access with ‘low latency’ will process data with minimal delay. You may also hear latency referred to as ‘lag’ or ‘lagging’ – where there is a disruption and delay due to bottlenecks within the network, reducing the amount of data which can be transferred over a period of time.

• VoIP

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. This is a term for the method of making and receiving phone calls using an internet connection rather than via traditional phone lines. VoIP is something we specialise in here at Infinitel, providing a business-grade solution that is cost-effective, secure and provides you with better business communications. All services are delivered over an internet connection with no call processing on site, all equipment is hosted in secure data centres.

• Cloud-based application

A cloud-based application is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like. It is a software program that is hosted in the cloud (typically a remote server in a data centre). Users can access and download data stored in the ‘cloud’ via the internet using a PC, tablet or smartphone. Some of the best known of cloud-based applications include Google Docs, Office 365 and Salesforce. 

• Jitter

Network jitter is congestion caused by millions of packets of data trying to use the same network and is often the difference between a successful VoIP phone call or a failed one. Jitter is caused by the division of information passing through the call into packets: each packet can use a different route to travel between one endpoint and another, which means the packets end up in the same place, but in a different order than originally sent. This results in speech becoming jumbled and/or words or sentences going missing entirely.  

• Packet Loss

Everything you do on the internet is actually sent and received in small units of data, often referred to as ‘packets’. If your network becomes congested and hits capacity, it can result in packets of data and information being lost.  This issue often appears as broken web pages that haven’t fully loaded, and also causes the ‘robotic’ effect on VoIP calls and a poor-quality video experience.