Your Office Wi-Fi Is Slow: It Is Probably Not the Internet

The complaint is always phrased the same way. The internet is slow. Video calls break up in the meeting room. Someone suggests calling the provider and upgrading the line, and a month later, with a faster connection and a bigger bill, the meeting room is exactly as bad as before.

That happens because the bottleneck was never the connection. Poor office Wi-Fi is usually a coverage, capacity or interference problem, and none of those improve when you buy more bandwidth.

Bandwidth is not the same as a good connection

Your internet line determines how much data can flow between your building and the outside world. Your wireless network determines how well each device reaches that line. They are separate problems with separate causes.

Video calls make this obvious. A call needs surprisingly little bandwidth, a few megabits at most. What it does need is consistency. Brief drops and variable delay wreck a call in a way that a raw speed test never reveals, which is why speed tests on office Wi-Fi are so misleading: they measure a burst of throughput, not stability over twenty minutes.

The four things that actually cause slow office Wi-Fi

Coverage

Wireless signal is weakened by distance and by whatever it passes through. Plasterboard barely matters. Concrete, brick, metal cabinets, lift shafts and older insulated glass matter a great deal.

The classic symptom: one router in a corner of the building, and the far meeting room has one bar. Devices then cling to a weak signal rather than dropping it, which is worse than no connection at all.

Capacity

Every access point has a practical limit on how many devices it can serve well. That limit is lower than the marketing claims, and modern offices are dense: laptop, phone, sometimes a tablet, plus printers, TVs, sensors and whatever else joined the network over the years.

Twenty-five people in a room served by one access point is a capacity problem no matter how new that access point is.

Interference and channels

The 2.4 GHz band reaches further but carries less and is crowded with everything from Bluetooth to neighbouring networks. In a business park you may be sharing airspace with a dozen other companies.

The 5 GHz band is faster and cleaner but does not travel as far through walls. Devices choose for themselves, and they often choose badly, staying on a distant access point long after a closer one became available.

Ageing equipment

Consumer routers running a small office is the most common finding. They are built for a home with ten devices, not a company with sixty, and their handling of many simultaneous connections is where they fall down first.

What you can check yourself

Before spending anything, gather evidence for half an hour.

• Test on a cable. Plug a laptop directly into the network. If it is fast and stable there but poor wirelessly, your internet line is fine and your office Wi-Fi is the problem.
• Map the complaints. Which rooms, which times of day, which devices. A problem confined to one corner is coverage. A problem that appears at nine every morning is capacity.
• Count the devices. Look at how many are connected during a busy hour. The number is usually double what people expect.
• Check the signal where it hurts. Most phones can show signal strength. Walk to the bad meeting room and look.
• Find out how old the hardware is. If nobody knows when the access points were installed, that is itself an answer.

Do all that and you can usually tell which of the four causes you are dealing with, which stops you buying the wrong solution.

What actually fixes it

Usually more access points rather than more powerful ones. Several modest units spread across a floor beat one strong device in a cupboard, because the limiting factor is the weak signal coming back from a phone, not the strength going out.

Cabling matters too. Access points work best wired back to a switch, ideally with power over that same cable. Wireless repeaters are a last resort, since they halve throughput and add delay.

Then the unglamorous parts: separate networks for guests and for devices that do not belong on your business network, sensible channel planning so your own access points do not compete with each other, and firmware kept current.

Let us measure it rather than guess

The honest problem with troubleshooting office Wi-Fi is that most of it is invisible. You cannot see signal strength, channel congestion or which device is dragging a channel down, so decisions get made on anecdote and someone ends up buying a faster line that changes nothing.

At EvolvingDesk we survey the building properly. We measure coverage where your people actually work, look at how many devices each access point is carrying, check for interference from your own equipment and from the neighbours, and then tell you the smallest change that fixes it. Sometimes that is repositioning what you already own.

You get a network that holds a video call in the far meeting room, and you stop paying for bandwidth that was never the issue.

Tired of the meeting room complaints? Plan a call and we will come and measure.

Read more

• What is VoIP, and why are businesses ditching landlines
• How to keep remote workers productive and secure
• The SMB guide to buying business laptops

Background: the Wi-Fi Alliance overview of wireless standards and the Wikipedia article on wireless LANs.