Tip of the Week: Six Reasons Your Network Might Be Slow

A slow network can be an infuriating problem under any circumstances, but in the business setting, not understanding its cause can potentially be devastating to operations. For this week’s tip, we’ll examine a few of the most common causes of this slowness, and some of the best ways to resolve the issue at hand.

ISP/Website Issues

First, you must consider if the issue you are experiencing with your network isn’t anything on your end, and instead is the fault of your ISP or whoever is hosting the website or service you are trying to use. Any downtime on their end will unfortunately translate to downtime on yours. Contacting your ISP or (if possible) checking an online outage tool like Down Detector might give you some insight into your issue.

Insufficient Bandwidth

You may also be overtaxing your available Internet services, straining your bandwidth by demanding too much at once and causing your processes to slow down. If this seems to be a nagging issue for your business, an investment into more bandwidth may be in order. Before you make the call to upgrade, however, double-check and make sure that your high network usage is only due to activities that are needed for work to be done. If you’re concerned that your bandwidth is being used for extracurricular purposes, a content filtering solution can be an effective measure to take.

Latency

While latency is just a sign of a larger problem, it is a very frustrating sign to deal with in and of itself. Each time your computer reaches out over a network, let’s say to a website, a small data packet is sent over and returned to confirm the connection. Latency is how much of a delay is present in the time it takes to send the packet (also known as a ping) and receive it back. A higher latency translates to a longer time, and by extension, a poorer user experience.

High latency can be caused by any number of issues and will have a negative effect on your business’ efficiency.

Malware

One of malware’s intentions is to waste the available resources on your network, diminishing its overall performance and thereby impacting your potential output and practical security measures.

Hardware and Software Issues

The older your hardware and software get, the less effective they become. This ultimately leads to network challenges.

Network Misconfiguration

Unfortunately, your network may be the root cause of the issue. Any poorly configured components could easily create difficulties, bottlenecks, and various other issues.

For assistance in identifying your particular source of network difficulties, give Computerware a call at (703) 821-8200.