We often get asked by new clients and many businesses, “how can I make our business computer network faster?”. There are many ways this can be done before considering upgrading your whole system and being experts in computer network configuration, we’ve put together a checklist to help you improve your computer network.
Some tips to make your computer network faster
#1 High-quality network cabling
If your office is running on WiFi or several mini-hubs strung together, you will always have an unreliable network and speed can be an issue. Upgrading to cat5e or cat6 cabling can improve your computer network speed significantly. If your performance is bad, your network cabling may have been poorly installed or terminated.
#2 Get a high-quality network switch
If you have more than 5 computers, you should consider upgrading to a gigabit managed network switch, ideally with POE. IF you are still running on 100MB (or even 10MB!) your network will be slow! A managed gigabit network switch offers enhanced performance for ethernet connected networks.
#3 Correct issues with your network configuration
Common problems are that the subnet mask is too big or loops of cables near power sources. Other configuration issues include faulty equipment creating traffic, printers sending out lots of useless traffic, firewalls not configured properly and most importantly of all, the DNS being incorrectly configured.
#4 Internet connection saturated
If your internet connection is very slow this will impact your internal network, especially if you are using cloud computing services such as office 365 or other cloud-based software. We have various solutions such as load balancers, traffic management and user education to help with this, whilst we can also provide you with faster internet links.
#5 Keep everything tidy
Its so much faster to troubleshoot a tidy network, often we can talk on-site staff through troubleshooting over the phone and save a site visit. However, if your network is spaghetti, you will pay out time and time again for engineers and your staff to troubleshoot minor issues which could have been solved remotely or in a more timely manner, had your network been better organised.
If you have done all the basics and your network is still lagging in performance, it’s time for some deeper troubleshooting. Packet captures, VLAN, spanning tree and a number of other areas will need to be looked at in turn to narrow down the bottlenecks and fix them. Sometimes teaming network ports (or un-teaming them) can have huge benefits to the speed, also virtualisation of old hardware can make things better (or worse if not properly configured).
Get in touch today if you would like an IT network speed audit. We can audit your systems to find out why the network is slow and of course, we can even fix it! We’re based in London and Surrey and offer managed IT services, including cyber security and cloud computing.
