6 minute read
The most common request we get is for more bandwidth. The second most common outcome is discovering that bandwidth was never the problem — and that the customer would have paid more every month for no improvement at all.
Bandwidth is width, not speed
Bandwidth is how much data can travel at once. Latency is how long each piece takes to arrive. They are unrelated, and almost every 'slow' complaint is actually about latency, jitter or packet loss.
Adding lanes to a motorway doesn't raise the speed limit. If an application feels sluggish because every request takes 180 ms to reach a server, a bigger circuit changes nothing.
Four things to check first
- Run a speed test at 9am and again at 4pm. A large gap means contention — you're sharing capacity, and the fix is a dedicated circuit, not a bigger shared one.
- Check upload separately. Broadband gives you a fraction of download on upload, and video calls, VPN and cloud backup are all upload-heavy.
- Ping something continuously for a few minutes. Steady numbers are fine; wild variation is jitter, and it destroys call quality regardless of speed.
- Test from a cable, not Wi-Fi. A surprising share of 'internet' problems are wireless coverage problems, and they're much cheaper to fix.
If the speed test is fine but everything feels slow, the bottleneck is almost certainly inside your building — a duplex mismatch, a failing switch port, a saturated uplink, or Wi-Fi. None of those get better with a bigger circuit.
When more bandwidth genuinely is the answer
If utilisation sits above about 70% during working hours, you're saturating the link and everything degrades — including voice. That's a real capacity problem and an upgrade will help immediately.
If saturation is occasional rather than constant, QoS is far cheaper than a permanent upgrade. Prioritise voice and critical applications, deprioritise backups, and the link stops feeling full at 4pm.
What we'd do
Measure before buying. A survey establishes whether the constraint is the circuit, the LAN, the wireless or an application — and we've told plenty of clients they didn't need the upgrade they came in asking for.
