By Andy Newby, Consultant, Network Systems and Support
The most likely answer is, itself, a question: What time is it?
Most frequently, slowdowns are reported during peak usage periods. You know, those first two hours of the work day, cluttered with e-mails and a general rush to the Internet for all its daily morning offerings. This sucks up your bandwidth, at least until lunch time, which morphs into less bandwidth demands from the likes of such things as basic fantasy football traffic or your garden variety social media Web site. While this slowdown might sound familiar and insurmountable without instituting strict surfing policies, there are some solutions you can consider.
Option 1: Purchase more bandwidth. Have you checked with your ISP lately to discover what they are offering in your area? If you haven’t checked in a while, you might be in for a surprise. Bandwidth prices have dropped dramatically in recent years. Also, more and more vendors are popping up in areas where they previously could not provide services, ramping up competition among service providers and giving you more leverage when considering broadband suppliers.
Unfortunately, you might find yourself stranglehold to lengthy service contracts. But, that leads to Option 2: You can still consider bringing in the additional broadband anyway. This gives you the ability to use the higher broadband right away, while utilizing the older and slower connection for failover purposes. You could even take it one step further and purchase relatively cheap bandwidth aggregator hardware that can combine your connections into one, making the most of multiple, simultaneous connections.
Keep in mind, too, that time is on your side. Option 3: Wait it out. If you are unable to get out of your current contract and do not wish to pay cancelation fees or the additional costs of a concurrent broadband service, faster and cheaper broadband is on the way and will always be available later.
One major contributor to your Internet slowdowns may very well be the flood of traffic to social media sites and the places they lead. Streaming online audio and video can be a real drag on your ISP connection. But with the increasing reliance on and participation in the social media wave and all the positives that come with it, accommodating the increased traffic can be tough, if not outright stifling.
As a solution, you might consider a network shaper (Option 4)— basically, a device that resides between your internal network and the Internet. Using a network shaper, you can actually prioritize your network utilization; more importantly, you can also better monitor network traffic. Those who actually need the streaming content to load faster can be on a priority channel, while at the same time allowing you to turn down or even turn off access to other online media. For example, Internet radio stations can be a culprit you might not have previously been aware of, but by tuning this out or down, your web browsing stands to gain more speed.
If you need help assessing the speed and effectiveness of your network, or implementing any of the above solutions, connect with DelCor to find out how we can help keep you happily browsing.