Nearly every modern business needs some form of internet connection, given its status as a primary marketing tool and often a way to make sales. Yet some service providers are behind the pack when it comes to servicing small businesses, and it will take a bit of research and time to make the right call.
Here are a few major factors to consider when deciding on the right ISP for your small business:
What’s Available in Your Area?
Unfortunately, we live in a time where many areas only have a couple of service providers available to them, severely limiting your options and acting as a de facto monopoly in some cases. Before getting lost in all the providers, the first thing to do is to perform a search to see what services you can get in your area and what speeds are provided by each service.
If you’re located in a big city, you’ll likely have plenty of options to choose from. Satellite internet is always available no matter where your location is. However, this option is slow, limited, and not usable for anything but the lightest of business purposes. Everyone else might have two or three choices.
What Are You Using it for?
Each business will have different needs and depending on those needs the right call might be different.
Are you looking to provide WiFi to your customers, or do you just need a connection for email and ordering? Do you want to stream internet content on monitors in your store? You might need a better download speed to keep everything else unaffected then.
Do you upload large video and audio files (perhaps marketing materials) regularly to social media platforms or YouTube? Then a strong upload speed will be a priority.
Download and Upload Speeds
The main question to consider when choosing a provider and plan is what speed you are going to need.
Most small businesses will get everything they need and more from a gigabit internet connection, although this might be pricey for some people. For basic functionality, anything above 100Mbps will often be enough. Anything lower than that and it gets into questionable territory and hopefully your small business can find something better.
Upload speeds are a bit of a different story. While some might have the same upload speed as a download speed (and that will be more than enough), others might be more limited. We recommend at least a 10 Mbps upload speed for most small businesses.
Reliability and Consistency
No matter how fast your download speeds might be, an ISP isn’t great unless you can rely on the connection working day in and day out, with as few interruptions and hiccups as possible. Having your Skype calls constantly cut out can be bad for business. There are horror stories of customers finding their connection is unstable, calling support and being told “That’s just how it is. You’re at the end of the line.”
You will want to do some research to make sure this doesn’t happen to you. Do your research to find out if this is a problem among your available options and weigh how important consistency is for you. Don’t trust the ISP websites on this; none of them are going to be honest about this factor if there is a problem.
Available Support
How much technical support does the ISP you might be looking at offer? Are you on your own for a week or two should there be a hardware failure, or can you expect same day (or even same hour) help? Your business shouldn’t be crippled by a lack of internet service when you’re paying top dollar for it, and some businesses are effectively shut down without it.
Don’t let this happen to you, and check both what the ISPs technical support policy is as well as read some reviews to see what the real picture might be. ISPs are known to often make promises they just can’t deliver on.
Conclusion
There are several factors that go into selecting the best internet service provider for your business. Fortunately, with the right tools and by answering a few questions as stated above, you’re most of the way to the best decision and quality service for your company.
Are there any other factors you think might be important to finding the right internet provider? Do you have any additional questions you’d like to ask? Please leave a comment below and join the conversation, as we would love to hear your thoughts.
Bio: Kevin Conner is the founder and CEO of Vast Bridges, a customer acquisition and lead generation company in the home services arena. Since 2011 more than 10M consumers and businesses have used Vast Bridges’ web properties to search for Internet and TV service. Most recently he and a small team have launched broadbandsearch.net, the U.S.’s leading home services (broadband and TV) search engine.
