Internet connection isn't great for small businesses. What options exist?
Internet connection isn't great for small businesses. What options exist?
The title might mislead, but performance is actually solid at 35-40 MiB/s, enough for typical office tasks. However, during late hours we ran a CSGO tournament with many participants and experienced frequent stuttering and lag spikes. No in-game drops or losses occurred—only the router box showed issues under heavy load (20 clients sending traffic to servers on a limited free internet connection). The management offered a few hundred dollars to fix the problem. I considered converting the old ISP box into an optical converter, redirecting network signals to optical form and using a PFSense device for routing. To be sure, would this resolve the issue? Or might adding a load balancer be sufficient without building a new PFSense setup? Thanks in advance.
You should consider a faster internet plan—it’s likely your top choice. Your upload speed might be the bottleneck. A more advanced router or firewall with improved queue handling could assist, but if your connection is already saturated, that won’t help much. The load balancer would be distributing traffic, and do you have several ISP connections?
We’re using just one ISP connection. The issue isn’t the available bandwidth, as we’re on the second fastest business speed here. The real challenge is the router struggling with the heavy load from 10 clients requiring high-quality service—low latency and consistent performance. We can download GTA V in about half an hour, which means it’s not slow by our standards. Around 35-40MiB/s translates to roughly 200-300MB/s, which is about a third of a gigabit connection. So from what you’re saying, I think we need that PF sense box.
If the modem or router isn't great, you should get your own. I tend to enjoy figuring things out, but pfSense will handle it just fine. Also, stick to bits per second for internet speeds—most people use megabits per second instead of bytes per second, which can be confusing. What are your upload speeds? Those might be the bottleneck here.
We received both 250/250 results. Likely the router box is the issue. It's a bit of a surprise what caused it. We get 250/250 megabit up and down, or around 30 megabytes per second in either direction. Apologies, English isn't my native language and network speeds can be confusing (Thanks ISP for aiming for higher numbers)
Likely the router is the simplest part to swap out and verify. Most people rely on bits to measure network performance, making bytes a bit confusing. Bits transfer one at a time across the connection, not whole bytes, and sometimes the actual count isn't exactly eight per byte.
I’ll collaborate with your boss to check the current configurations and requirements, ensuring everything stays stable. Avoid relying on the ISP modem since it doesn’t offer strong management, security, reliability, or user interface. It might not be the best choice here—cheap routers usually handle this well, but testing is the simplest step.