Broadband doctor: The perils of too many smart devices connecting to your WiFi

Question: We allow our staff to bring in and work on their own smart devices, but is that a bad idea when we’re already struggling with connectivity or does it not really make a difference?

Answer: In terms of broadband connectivity, so long as your employees are not also downloading lots of films, music – it does tend to happen – or software updates when the smart devices are in the office it will make little difference.

If they are, then your connection speed will undoubtedly suffer – especially, as you suggest, your connection speed is already slow.

For starters, your connection speed heavily depends on what network equipment you have. An ethernet connection is often faster than WiFi – and your WiFi connection will start to slow down the more devices connect to it.

In fact, the older a WiFi router becomes the less devices it will support, so if you have a tally of over 30 WiFi devices in an office and an old router it may be time to upgrade to something which supports the latest WiFi standards.

You should also think of getting something with better processor and memory to support all those devices – and make sure staff aren’t downloading films.

The wider topic, however, is one of security. As a company how do you know that a device from home does not have some malware on it? Malware cold be running i the background of someone’s device without their knowledge and it uses up your bandwidth allocation, causing the network to slow down. The only true solution for this is regular security updates.

Or what happens when someone leaves their tablet on a train and there is no lock on it, so someone can access the device reading company email or worse start to use the tablet and impersonate someone.

This article is part of our Real Business Broadband campaign, which seeks to provide a mouthpiece for business leaders to vocalise the broadband issues preventing their businesses from reaching full potential. We’d love to hear your take on the debate and where you think the UK needs to make drastic changes – and feel to ask us your broadband queries. Get in touch via email (shane.schutte@realbusiness.co.uk) or join in on the action using #rbBroadband.

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