Priority business broadband
Although the "mb" speed of your broadband is important, there are also other factors that mean that your internet applications don't run as fast as your expect or causes your business problems.
Although you may have believe you have an 8mb connection the truth is that the actual speed of the data to and from your computer to the worldwide web constantly fluctuate for a number of reasons.
A lot of this fluctuation occurs at or after your exchange, so although your line may report that it is making an 8mb connection between you and your exchange the true speed at which you get data from the internet can be very different and is likely to vary throughout the day.
This is due to two reasons:
Contention
Non prioritised internet traffic
Although you may have an 8mb connection to your exchange, you will probably find that it is shared with up to 50 other businesses. If all 50 were to use their connection at full capacity at exactly the same moment in time your connection would physically run at 50 times slower than the 8mb connection you were expecting. It is unlikely that the problem would ever be this bad but this can be responsible when you feel that your broadband is not lightening fast as you would expect with the reported 8mb connection.
To over come this problem we can reduce your contention at your local exchange or even remove it all together so that you have a 1:1 contention ratio. This can be very important for time sensitive real time business applications and voip or video.
Once your sending and pulling data from the internet the other factor that effects your business is if the data/traffic is prioritised as "business". Non prioritised traffic running over the internet will wait in a queue whilst prioritised business traffic will flow straight to the front to ensure that business data is not held up causing your internet to slow down at certain times of the day.