Why Slow Internet Costs Companies Money

If your company has slow internet, how much productivity are you losing over the course of that year?
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Web collaboration is one of the most powerful tools for any business. Because of this it isn't wise to cheap out on office's internet service.
Web collaboration is one of the most powerful tools for any business. Because of this it isn't wise to cheap out on office's internet service.

Here’s some good news: Technological advancements offer today’s companies solutions that save them time and money.

Here’s some not-so-good news: When these solutions don’t perform as they were intended, they end up leading to massive operational failures and lost profits.

The Internet has made tremendous advancements in the last decade, and more and more businesses around the world have developed digital assets to compete in the global marketplace. The result? The demand for bandwidth is at an all-time high.

Fiber optic technology enables services like Google Fiber to provide incredibly fast internet.
Fiber optic technology enables services like Google Fiber to provide incredibly fast internet.

In the past five years alone, global data usage has increased fourfold. In fact, a report from the International Telecommunications Union shows that the number of Internet users has increased from 738 million in 2000 to 3.2 billion in 2015. This spike in data consumption is expected to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The speeds that were the standard only a couple of years ago are now not fast enough to run a forward thinking business efficiently.

What has caused this dramatic usage spike? No doubt the widespread adoption of cloud computing solutions as well as other bandwidth intensive business applications such as P2P, ERP, video conferencing and content sharing. On top of this, companies are now inviting employees to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), which means networks are now inundated with additional WiFi devices such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, music players, etc. The substantial increase in the number of devices deployed on a network has caused lags in speed, and other slow-downs that were not anticipated only a few years ago.

3 Business Failures That Result from a Slow Internet

Business owners must prepare their network to handle additional usage requirements. Failure to do so can and will lead to slow downs and interruptions to workflows that may potentially have a significant negative impact on their bottom lines. Here are 3 specific business failures that can result from a slow and under-performing network.

Diminished Productivity

Employees can hardly be expected to complete their work when they’re waiting around all day for the network to catch up to speed. How much time is wasted every day in your organization as team members wait for file transfers, attachments to download, and applications and web pages to open? Answer: far too much.

Slow internet causes costly delays in your company’s operations and workflow management. Consider a 2013 survey by storage experts, Sandisk, that revealed the average employee wastes one week per year waiting on their company’s network to respond. Now multiply this loss by 10, 20, or 100 employees.

If your company has slow internet, how much productivity are you losing over the course of that year?

Poor Employee Morale

Let’s consider these same employees who are waiting around for the network to respond in order to get their work done. They show up to work with the intention of getting a lot accomplished, and they expect their management to provide them with the tools necessary to do their job efficiently.

When the network is slow it causes great frustration and employee morale to tank. This then leads to employees becoming demotivated. A recent poll conducted by Deloitte of workers in Australia revealed the number one end user frustration is slow internet. If your company has a slow network you can expect employee complaints to rise and morale to drop.

Revenue Takes a Hit

Beyond your employees’ inability to complete their work and morale taking a nosedive, slow internet causes lost profits. For instance, should your company’s CRM system be sluggish, your customer’s experience will most likely be negatively impacted. What happens when your customer’s discover your competitors are able to respond much faster because of a more efficient network? You lose profits.

Now consider what happens should your company operate an e-commerce site with a slow internet. Google bases their search results partially on load time. Should your website load slowly, the result is lower page rank, decreased web traffic and revenue loss. Plus, customers aren’t about to wait while your pages load. They’ll click out of your site and head over to your competitor’s site instead.

Has your company been negatively impacted by slow transmitting, and high latency internet? If so, the time to fix the issue is now.

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