Photo by Frederik Lipfert on Unsplash
In the fast-paced virtual environment businesses take place in today, internet access is easily the most essential tool in any industry. Your internet connection is what keeps you in touch with the world. Every website you visit and every file you download or upload relies on invisible packets of data racing through wires and airwaves into your home or office. Internet speed is something you take for granted and something you don’t think about until it stops working or gives you trouble.
Testing Your Internet Speed
There are many tools available online to test your internet speed. Simply searching the internet for speed test in a web browser will yield a list of different options.
Interpreting the Results
It’s easy to test your internet, but what do the results mean? Internet speed test tools will test your download and upload speed in Mbps, or megabits per second. A bit is the smallest measure of binary data; each bit is a single 0 or 1. A megabit is 1 million bits. The measure of Mbps is how many millions of bits a network can theoretically transfer each second. One million bits is not much data in modern terms. That’s roughly one heavily compressed image or a large Excel file.
For a computer network to have a reasonable speed, it will need to operate at many Mbps. Speed tests will often provide latency, measured in milliseconds (ms). It will ping the servers of whoever is providing the speed test (Google, your internet provider, etc.) and tell you how long in milliseconds it takes for your data to reach the servers and receive a response. Latency most affects things happening in real-time, such as live streams or Virtual Desktop Sessions. Typically, anything under 100ms is acceptable, but the lower this number is, the faster you can send and receive data.
How Much Speed do you Need
So, what can you do to ensure that you always have what you need and keep internet-related interruptions to a minimum? To determine the best internet speed for your business, you can add up all the speed requirements of everything you plan on doing at the same time and find an internet plan that can accommodate it. However, it’s not always quite so simple. You need to evaluate your business and find the right internet provider who can consistently deliver the speeds you need. Important factors include the size of your operation, how much internet-connected equipment will be operated, and what kind of work takes place on the equipment. There is no one size fits all solution to internet connection speeds, as every business’s demands are different.
At Calyx, our engineering team carefully analyzes every aspect of your business. We consider all of the needs of your business to ensure your whole network, internet connection included, will fit the demands of your workload and ensure reliability.