How ISP throttling can affect your business
Has your business ever suffered slow internet, despite paying for ultra-premium speeds?
If the answer isn’t obvious like having too many users, devices or poor signal – then it could be ISP throttling, and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might be the culprit.
A recent survey found that over half a million UK businesses are struggling with insufficient bandwidth. And while it’s not an immediate cause for panic, it can have an impact on your business, particularly if it’s happening too often.
So, what exactly is throttling and what can you do about it?
What’s ISP throttling?
In plain terms, throttling is when your ISP deliberately slows down your connection or restricts your bandwidth. You might notice that your connection is being unusually clunky, particularly on certain sites or apps. You might be able to get away with some basic browsing, but streaming, video calls or large file transfers struggle.
Why do ISPs throttle internet speeds?
There are a number of reasons your ISP might try to throttle your internet speed. The most common include:
Network congestion: During peak times, networks can become overloaded. To ease some of the strain, the provider may decide to slow down certain connections – usually the heaviest users.
Suspicious activity: If an ISP detects highly unusual activity that could be malicious or fraudulent, it may choose to restrict your bandwidth. This can even happen accidentally, for example if unexpectedly high but genuine data usage is happening on a network.
Data caps: If you exceed your agreed data allowance, your ISP may choose to throttle your service, rather than cut you off completely. This ‘soft cap’ or ‘fair usage’ limit might have been written into your contract and stops customers from using too much bandwidth.
Prioritising certain users: Some ISPs allow certain users to pay to be prioritised and get better, more stable service. Unfortunately, that means those that haven’t paid for this treatment might experience lag or buffering when their traffic is competing with these premium users.
How do I check for ISP throttling?
One way to check for throttling is to ask whoever’s in charge of your IT to run multiple speed tests, ideally at different times using the following scenarios:
Speed tests under normal conditions
Speed tests connected to a Virtual Private Network (VPN)
If the VPN tests keep scoring higher, then there’s a good chance your connection is being throttled. And equally, if you’re finding that your online activities that were previously lagging run more smoothly with a VPN – this can also be a major clue.
How does ISP throttling affect my business?
Understandably for most businesses, having a slow or disrupted connection on a regular basis isn’t ideal. While your ISP may have good intent, throttling activities have a number of real-world impacts that businesses simply can’t afford to ignore:
Customer experience: If your business is using consumer-facing, 3rd party hosted services, like eCommerce platforms or apps, and your connection is being throttled, your customers will be affected. It can also affect customer service interactions, and your staff’s ability to resolve problems, as quickly and smoothly as they’d like.
Employee productivity: One in five (20%) UK businesses say that poor internet speeds have a negative impact on their day-to-day operations. Throttling can slow down your workforce’s ability to carry out their jobs effectively. They might experience delayed data transfers or friction when using new technologies or cloud-based services.
Remote workers: Remote workers are reliant on seamless connection for video calling, remote access tools and cloud-hosted services. So, if their connection is being throttled, it can begin to impact their work.
Collaboration and communications: Poor quality meetings on VoIP can make your business seem unprofessional.
Financial impacts: Everything already in this list will also have some level of financial impact on your business, even if small – whether that’s loss of sales and customer retention, or increased staffing and resourcing costs due to delayed work or time wasted. In fact, over half of UK businesses claimed that poor internet speeds risked losing clients.
How can I stop ISP throttling?
It’s not all doom and gloom though, there are steps businesses can take to prevent or reduce being throttled:
Monitor your bandwidth usage: Encouraging your IT team to use bandwidth monitoring tools, track data usage and keep on top of how many devices are connected at any one time, can prevent you from getting throttled by your provider.
Use a VPN: As with the speed tests we recommended above, strategic use of VPNs can help you get around ISP throttling. Though this is often only temporary.
Educate your employees: Teach your staff about the impacts of throttling and how to reduce unnecessary data usage or avoid non-work-related, data-heavy activities in work hours – particularly things like YouTube and Netflix!
Choose a different provider: We left it ‘til last, but in truth, you don’t have to put up with throttling. If it’s becoming a persistent problem, it might be time to switch provider. Just make sure to ask if they throttle, have any data policies or ‘soft caps’ in place, and gauge how they manage their traffic at peak times.
Get quality business broadband without throttling
At LightSpeed, we never throttle. We’re proud to say all of our services, both business and residential, are fully uncapped. So, we’ll never slow your business down, even at the busiest, peak times.
You can take a look at the range of great business broadband packages we have available here, going right up to our ultra-fast 5 Gbps speeds: Business Full Fibre Broadband | Ultrafast Broadband