Nigel Short of Voot Telecom gives an insight into just how important internet speed can be for your business
I have a borderline obsession with internet speeds.
I think it stays on the right side of a healthy enthusiasm most of the time. But I can’t help but feel my face light up when I see internet speed tests that my business, Voot Telecom, have conducted and they come back with the kind of results that are the equivalent of the four-minute mile.
Honestly, it’s a joy. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around mobile phones long enough to remember the first time I loaded a page on WAP, which was a useful and notable step in mobile internet evolution, but hardly lived up to the promise of the internet in the palm of your hand. Younger readers might not remember WAP, but it wasn’t an amazing experience, no matter what Cardi B thinks. (Younger readers can console themselves that older readers are googling ‘Cardi B’ at this point!)
Twenty-something years later, mobile internet has leapfrogged wired connections to be the main way we access the web. The Cardi B fans can barely go 10 minutes without checking their social media and the cardigan fans aren’t much better. The internet consumes much of our work and home lives and we need the internet speeds that we are accustomed to on our mobile phones on our work devices too.
The modern office needs the internet, and it needs fast internet access. There have been a number of great initiatives to make sure our region has access to fibre broadband speeds, but unfortunately the holes can’t always be dug quick enough to keep up with demand, or it simply isn’t affordable to get to us all.
I found this recently when I visited a new client in North Sheffield who couldn’t get fibre access. They had jumped around providers over the years, always promised better speeds than eventually materialised. Fortunately, we don’t need to check a database to guess speeds, I can just take my mobile phone with me and find out the real speeds…
That’s a solid result and means we can fit one of Voot Telecom’s Fast 4G connections very quickly and have them using multiple devices over WiFi. It’s a fixed device that uses the mobile network, which in a lot of cases is stronger, faster and more reliable than the fixed line broadband in the area, particular if there’s a low population density and no-one has got around to laying fancy new cables.
Then sometimes this happens…
I visited a new client in Retford in a five-person business. They were struggling with video calls if more than one of the team was online at the same time.
Here’s the screenshot from my mobile when I tested the speeds…
Now, most of you haven’t spent as long as I have working in business telecoms, so I’ll forgive you if your heart isn’t skipping a beat seeing those numbers. But for context, forget a four-minute mile. That’s a four-minute marathon.
There’s a lot more to what we do than just that speed test. Keeping customers happy means we work a lot harder than just setting you up and walking away. But results like that are one of the joys of what we do and I’m very happy to report that modern 5G networks are making them all the more common.
Speed isn’t everything when it comes to business web access, but it definitely matters.
If you would like to arrange a free test to check your connection speeds at your home or office, give me call on 01143211504 or visit www.voot.org
