When you're paying top dollar to get the best available internet service, it can be baffling to find your browser struggling to open even the simplest websites. However, there are a number of very good reasons why even the best internet service can struggle. This can be a bit problematic for your business if you rely on the internet to carry out various day-to-day activities. There are a number of factors that have been well noted to bring down business internet speeds, and here are just a few you might want to mention to IT support. 

Streaming Video Content

Streaming videos consume a lot more bandwidth than most other internet services. When you have a number of users who are constantly accessing video streaming websites such as YouTube and Netflix, it's quite easy for the quality of everyone's internet connection to suffer.

If your company allows the employees to use the internet for personal use, be sure that you first block access to websites that facilitate streaming of videos or increase the bandwidth available.

Downloading Updates

If you have a large number of computers each running the same software and operating systems, you might experience a reduction in internet speeds each time an update is made available. This is because each computer will be attempting to download the update over the internet.

An easy solution for this problem is to centralize application updates. This means that the relevant updates can be downloaded at one location and made available to the rest of the computers in the network. This can greatly conserve bandwidth.

Cloud Backups

Cloud computing has become an important part of how companies store and back up their information. To send information to the cloud or to access information that's already in the cloud, you will need to use the internet. If the information consists of a few Microsoft Office files, this shouldn't be too much trouble.

However, as your demands grow, so will the cloud application's demand for bandwidth. Additionally, creating an initial back up of your whole computing system when you start backing up to the cloud can hog a lot of bandwidth for weeks.

Identify Heavy Users

When you have a reliable internet service provider that you can be sure is delivering the bandwidth you pay for, you can also solve the problem by identifying the heaviest internet users in your system. It's possible for individual users to be hogging bandwidth because they're using peer-to-peer file sharing software or something else. This can affect the quality of your internet connection in general.