17
Nov
You may have seen providers offering various speeds up to 100Mbps or even 1000Mbps but what does it actually mean and can you really tell the difference?
Fibre broadband speeds are measured in Megabits per second and are categorised as ‘Superfast’ up to ~67Mbps or ‘Ultrafast’ up to ~1000Mbps (or 1 Gbps). The difference is down to the fibre line (wires) connected to your home. Superfast fibre uses a fibre line to your local street cabinet (the green boxes at the end of the road) then a copper wire to your home whereas UItrafast (full fibre) sends a fibre cable directly to your premises.
For businesses, the speed you need depends more on what you’re using it for rather than the technical names.
For a small office of 1-10 people the ‘Superfast’ connection is actually fine for most day-to-day work like emails, web browsing, cloud use. But if everyone starts video calling at once, you’ll notice it struggling and starting to lag/buffer.
A medium office, say 10-20 people you’ll then want to start looking at Ultrafast territory 100-200 Mpbs minimum. Multiple video conferences, file sharing, and cloud systems all running simultaneously need proper bandwidth.
Anything larger than this (20+ people) will need 500+Mbps to keep everyone happy. When you’ve got that many people online, downloading and uploading, you don’t want it to keep slowing down every time someone tries to upload a large file.
However, the major providers offering “up to” speeds rarely deliver what’s promised. We’ve seen businesses paying for “Superfast” 67Mbps and getting 25Mbps on a busy day. That’s why we focus on getting you dedicated connections that actually deliver what you’re paying for.
Upload vs Download
Most home broadband is asynchronous which means you get fast download speeds but rubbish upload speeds. So you might have 67 Mbps download but only 10 Mbps upload.
For businesses this is a big problem because every video call, every file transfer, cloud backup, or email you send uses bandwidth. When everyone is trying to upload at the same time, it starts to slow down.
This is why we offer Synchronous connections that give you the same speed both ways. If you’ve got 100Mbps synchronous that’s 100Mbps upload and 100Mbps download (hence the arrows). This explains why business connections cost more and why those residential “Superfast” packages often feel sluggish in office environments.
The Bottom Line
Whether it’s fibre, Starlink, or point-to-point wireless, we don’t just sell you the fastest package – we figure out what your business actually needs. A 5-person office doesn’t need 1 Gbps, but a 20-person office definitely needs more than basic “superfast” speeds.
We’ve seen too many businesses paying for speeds they’ll never use, or worse, stuck with connections that can’t handle their daily workload. That’s why we take the time to understand how you work before recommending a solution.