Wireless broadband has become a mainstay in many homes, giving many people easy access to information on how to get things done for their everyday tasks. What more for a company that has hundreds if not possibly thousands of workers relying on online processes every single day? In times of trouble, you can call on your internal tech support personnel, but you may want to coordinate directly with them to learn exactly why your connection could be slowing down. This can help you stay calm instead of frustrated if the connection dies again later on. Ask yourself, your staff, or preferably your tech personnel the following:
“Do We Have Any Programs That Are Running in the Background?”
When employees start accessing the internet using their computers, there are a myriad of processes that start as soon as you boot up the CPU. The same concept applies in some way to your wireless broadband connection. While you may be working on main tasks using programs that are not really using up much of your allocated monthly plan, there could be other apps that are out of sight but hogging all of the upload and download speeds. They could be all sorts of software, from drivers that somehow require the use of the net in order to function, games that somehow found their way onto your staff’s hard drive, to file storage and transfer apps that slow things down when a huge document is trying to make its way from one person’s PC to another.
(Friendly note: If there does happen to be a game installed on your employee’s work PC, you need to ask them another set of questions.)
“Have We Tried Turning These Apps On and Off?”
It sounds like a cliché tech support answer for troubleshooting routers, but there really is some truth to this piece of advice. Go through the task manager in your company OS of choice and check if there is any app you aren’t actively using that you can close. Cloud applications such as Dropbox are notorious for eating up precious resources, as they constantly sync the moment somebody uploads, downloads, or edits a file located in the system. Another app that could be causing your net to lag could be any anti-virus or anti-malware programs installed on your work computers. While we would not recommend turning those security programs off entirely, you may need to go into your settings and adjust your firewall, as it could possibly be—and unintentionally—blocking you from accessing some sites that your people need to finish their tasks.
Keep Calm and Troubleshoot Away
Though these are relatively simple questions, finding the answers to them can usually be enough to solve most of your tech issues related to your internet connectivity. There are many more you can look into, and the sooner you orient yourself with ways to diagnose similar problems, the better you can be at coordinating with your staff and delivering results to your clients on time.