Image Credit: Vincent Miller – https://www.192-168-0-1Login.org
Before we get into what speed broadband do you need, its worth mentioning how speed is calculated, its easy to get confused between Mbps and MBps. In this article I will refer to speeds as Mbps. Mbps is the standard speed type quoted when talking about broadband, it refers to Mega Bits per second (as opposed to MBps which is Mega Bytes per second).
To add to the confusion you can also get different types of broadband. You can have ADSL, Fibre and cable. The oldest and typically slowest is ADSL which is broadband that is via a phone line, Fibre utilises Fibre Optic cable (for part or all of the cable length) and ‘cable’ traditionally meant coax cable.
Now we have that cleared up lets look at what you need for your business…
It’s a moving target….so what broadband speed do i need
So how fast you NEED depends on what you do, how many people do it and how fast you want things done. In days gone by slower connections did not necessarily mean a slower user experience, remember that a website from 2009 was far less feature rich than a website from 2019 and as such they may well have taken the same amount of time to load as today.
However other things have changed, the way in which businesses consume content has changed. Twitter posts featuring HD video, Cloud software, large email attachments etc etc these are now fundamental to even small businesses.
Given that many businesses are now (correctly) moving their business phones over to a hosted VOIP or hosted PBX system as well this adds further strain onto broadband connections.
As users add more and more data with more stuff being synced online as a result (Dropbox / Google Drive etc) the required speed can only ever be estimated. You can use a speed testing website such as SpeedTest.net to see what speed your current broadband connection provides.
That being said our research and years in the industry have given us a good idea of what most businesses need so here are our findings..
2-5 Mbps – FOR EACH COMPUTER – Assuming a typical office PC or laptop with email / web browsing and maybe some music streaming
0.5-1 Mbps – FOR EACH VOIP PHONE
5-10 Mbps – FOR EACH FILE or EMAIL SERVER – Unless you are using hosted email
2-5 Mbps – FOR EACH MOBILE DEVICE
With the above in mind if we take a typical 10 user company with 10 desktop computers (doing normal office tasks), 10 VOIP phones with each user using their iPhones. In addition lets throw in a couple of Windows Servers then to ensure a decent service we would suggest a incoming connection of around 80 Mbps, Our 80 Mbps fibre broadband package would be ideal.