Time is Money – Buy the Fastest Internet You Can Afford

One of the most-asked questions we get at Central Coast is, “Why is my Internet slower at work than at home?” The answer in a nutshell boils down to a couple key things.

First, there are a lot of consumers out there using the Internet. Infrastructure has been built to cater to the magnitude of home users around the world. There are more individual consumers than businesses, and other than the CIO, high level executives don’t often fully understand the wealth of productivity lost each day through slow connections. So the home user is the squeaky wheel. When they can’t stream their Netflix movie, or search quickly for the optimal recipe for Orange Chicken, or need click through at lightning speed to purchase the latest series of Transformer toy, they complain loudly. Meanwhile, corporate office buildings and skyscrapers are still working to catch up with how their tenants’ workflow has shifted – everything is online – and engineers are still scrambling to build networks to support the flow of data and information both in and out of offices.

Second, company managers don’t often understand and manage the things that are hogging their bandwidth. Here’s an example. Executive Assistant Marge is unintentionally using a bunch of bandwidth that Graphic Designer Ellen needs, because Marge is streaming her favorite online music station to her desktop. Marge also has the Internet open to multiple pages with ads continually popping up, even though she’s off at a meeting for the next hour and a half and her computer is not set to sleep while she’s away from her desk (which is another security issue entirely, mind you.) Meanwhile, Designer Ellen is watching the spinning ball swirl while trying to download some stock photos for her project. She’s not only frustrated because she’s on a deadline, but feels her tools are effecting her performance – everything is so slow and unproductive. It doesn’t pay to complain or ask for help because nobody listens and everyone’s in the same boat anyway. Meanwhile, she has ample time to ponder that while she waits for her slow downloads to finish.

Control What You Can – Here Are Some Great Solutions

1. Central Coast will test and troubleshoot your hardware. We’ll check to make sure you are using the fastest DNS for your connection. Also, we’ll fix or replace your router or modem. It may not even be your Internet connection that is slowing you down! (To test your speed against what you are paying for, Speedtest.net is a great resource.) If your office is older with a lot of steel walls, we will check the placement of your wi-fi to reposition or boost it for optimal speed. Finally, we will hardwire key components – so you aren’t using valuable bandwidth for your computer to talk to an internal server or printer, for example.
2. We’ll do a mini-audit to see how your office is using your bandwidth. Asking Marge (above) to stop streaming music and to close her browser when she’s not at her desk, can help. Also, other workflow adjustments can be helpful. If you work in an office with limited bandwidth that you cannot increase or control, your employees should have a basic understanding of the tasks that use heavy versus light bandwidth, and optimize that to be efficient for everyone on the team whenever possible.
3. Central Coast is on a first-name basis with many local Internet providers. They respond quickly when we call them to find out if you are getting the fastest connection for the money – because they know we can influence our clients with future purchases for their services. We may recommend you change providers if you can get faster, cheaper service elsewhere.

Lessen Your Pain By Staying Out of the Cloud

Finally, if you lose your Internet connection, even for a few hours, it’s downright painful and you quickly find out how long it takes in real time for minutes and hours to go by when there’s nothing else happening around you. There’s no email, no customer service service, no purchasing, no shipping, no billing, and possibly no company website (if you host onsite). Further complicating things, if you’ve made the unwise and unfortunate decision to put your entire business into the hands of a Cloud provider, you have a dead piece of metal to stare at (also known as your hardware), because in addition to the list above, you have no software or applications. Check out this article for more information about Cloud security.

Central Coast Solutions is Ready to Help Your Organization Optimize Productivity.

Whether you are running a business from home and need the reliability, support and static IP address of a Business Internet plan – or are dealing in with complicated network structures of large office buildings – we can help get to the bottom of why your Internet is not working as fast as you need it to.

Time is money. Our hourly rate is often less than what you bill your clients.

Getting You Back to Doing Great Work for Your Clients at Top Speed is Our Goal.

Contact us at service@centralcoastweb.com to get started.