Frustrated with slow internet speed? Here's why...

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If you’re finding your remote experience sluggish, here are a few tips for you.

Your internet connection is based on what you have as a connection medium. If you are on fibre you don’t have much to worry about as this is the most stable connection. However, if you are running on LTE or ADSL/VDSL you may experience issues as these are what we class as best-effort services.

• Ensure that whilst working you aren’t also streaming video services such as Showmax, DStv, Netflix or Amazon Prime streaming video as this can affect your internet experience on best-effort services.

• If you are torrenting files you will definitely experience poor internet performance as torrenting will take the maximum bandwidth on your internet connection. Consider torrenting after hours or limit the bandwidth rate in the torrenting application.

• Understand that having many people on your wireless at home could also induce poor performance. Use an average of 5mbps for every person in your household. If you have a 20Mbps line and you have four people at home you should be ok for normal browsing. As soon as you stream or add another user you can expect poor performance while working.

• Most uncapped connections have what is called a Fair Usage policy since we are traditionally not at home as much as we are now this is something to keep in mind. Your ISP would have this published on their Website.

  An example would be that some ISPs allow you up to 400GB per month, if you exceed this threshold they then throttle your experience to half speeds. You may notice your internet speed decline, especially around month-end. Find out from your ISP what their Fair Usage policy is.

• If you are on LTE, this works just like your cell phone does and you will need to find the best placement of the router in your house to receive the best signal. Just moving the router around may help you find better signal giving you a better performance. Most routers have an indicator light which lets you know the strength of your signal.

• It is common to reboot your LTE device. If you are finding your internet to be a real pain, reboot your router. If the issue still persists reboot your notebook and see if this helps improve your experience.

In an ideal world, everyone should have fibre with as much bandwidth as possible. Some would even consider it a basic human right after the Covid -9 pandemic. The tips above will help you to have an optimised experience while you work.