Scaling Your Network for Growth

Scaling Your Network for Growth: Determining the Ideal Wi-Fi Coverage for Small Businesses with New Employees

For small businesses, growing and adding new employees is key to long-term success. But as businesses grow, they’ll need to keep up with new demands. Ensuring that the business continues to have a stable and reliable Wi-Fi network is essential for a smooth transition. 

What happens if a business’s Wi-Fi network can’t keep up with growth? When a business outgrows its network, it could lead to lower productivity and a loss of profits. With slower internet, employees will not be able to perform their jobs efficiently. Additionally, businesses may have issues with customer or client interactions that could lead to a loss in profits. 

To avoid the problems of a slow system that may crash frequently, small businesses should prepare their network infrastructure appropriately to account for growth. When trying to determine the ideal Wi-Fi coverage for their operations, businesses should consider several different factors. We’ll discuss in more depth how small businesses should determine their Wi-Fi network and how to set up a scalable network.

Why Do Businesses Need to Scale Their Network Infrastructure to Accommodate Growth?

If your business depends on a secure and reliable internet connection to support its daily operations, you’ll need an IT infrastructure that’s scalable to growth. Without a Wi-Fi connection that’s capable of supporting your business’s day-to-day operations, you’ll risk a loss in profits and overall efficiency. 

For example, with inadequate Wi-Fi, your employees will not be able to perform their jobs efficiently, which will lead to lost time and money for small business owners. Additionally, if your business experiences frequent service disruptions, it may affect your customer or client interactions. Consistently bad customer interactions can have potentially long-term negative consequences for small businesses.

By choosing a Wi-Fi installation solution that fits your business’s needs, you’ll avoid these negative disruptions that could harm your business. A small business that is experiencing growth, should look to a Wi-Fi solution that can provide the coverage a business needs to thrive. 

Why Is Having Stable Wi-Fi Essential for Businesses?

The Internet is an inescapable part of modern businesses. To perform daily tasks and keep up with the competition, you’ll need a stable internet connection for your employees and customers. For a lot of businesses, employee performance hinges on having a fast and reliable internet connection. Without it, you’ll have low levels of productivity and inefficiency.  

For businesses that rely on daily customer transactions, having a stable connection to the internet is also important. In today’s modern world, most customers rely on cashless transactions to buy the things they need. If the Wi-Fi is slow or down altogether, this will create negative interactions with customers, it may also cause the business to lose out on profits. To avoid those issues, you’ll need to ensure that your business can handle all of the necessary online tasks efficiently, even with growth. 

What Factors Affect Wi-Fi Performance?

There are many factors that might affect your small business’s Wi-Fi performance. But one of the most common factors that affect small businesses’ Wi-Fi performance is the addition of new employees. With more employee devices connected to the business’s network, the internet speed will be slower. 

With a growing business, you may also see an influx of customers connecting to your Wi-Fi. Like with an increase in the number of employees, more customers using your Wi-Fi may affect speeds and reliability. 

Another common reason why a small business’s Wi-Fi performance might be slower than usual is an increase in IoT devices. When small businesses grow, that could mean more IoT devices to help run your business operations. These smart devices could be using up the bandwidth. 

The kinds of applications and programs a business uses may also affect Wi-Fi performance. For businesses that use the internet to perform complex tasks like large data transfers, video conferencing, cloud-based applications, and large file uploads, having enough bandwidth is essential to running these day-to-day tasks. If your business performs these types of tasks, you’ll need to consider how extra employees may affect the Wi-Fi coverage. 

What Factors Should Small Businesses Consider When Determining Ideal Wi-Fi Coverage?

For small businesses that begin to add employees over time, knowing the ideal Wi-Fi coverage amount is tricky. If you’re trying to determine the kind of coverage you need during the Wi-Fi installation, there are a few different factors to consider. Whether you’re dealing with an influx of new employees and need more bandwidth or you need faster speeds to ensure smooth customer transactions, you’ll need to consider a few factors to determine the ideal Wi-Fi coverage your organisation needs. 

The Number of Employees/Customers

Before you begin a Wi-Fi installation, you should consider the coverage. For growing businesses, you’ll want to find a solution that will be scalable to your business. When a business sees more employee and customer devices connected to the network, the speeds will decrease as the bandwidth will be divided evenly amongst the devices. 

It’s important to take into account the number of employees and customers you reasonably expect to have during the Wi-Fi installation process. As your business grows, you’ll need to have adequate bandwidth for new employees and customers. If you don’t properly prepare for growth, like finding a scalable network solution, then you might have to pay for expensive, premature upgrades in the future. 

The Number of Connected Devices

When choosing the ideal Wi-Fi coverage for your business, you should consider the number of connected devices at peak times during the day. The number of connected devices might include the computing devices and smartphones of employees and customers. 

It will also include IoT devices. What are IoT devices? It’s easy to forget about these kinds of devices when taking a headcount of your business’s network-connected devices. IoT–or Internet of Things–refers to devices that have sensors and other technologies that connect and transfer information via an Internet connection. 

What kinds of IoT devices might a company connect to their network? As IoT becomes more and more common, businesses have adopted IoT in their businesses to improve efficiency, productivity, and security. Some of the common IoT devices found in offices include environment monitoring (smart thermostats, air quality monitoring, etc.). Offices may also use IoT devices for the automation of tasks, including smart scheduling systems. Additionally, many businesses use IoT devices for smart security systems.

As your small business grows, you may want to add more IoT to your business environment to boost productivity and efficiency. You should consider what kinds of IoT devices you may want to incorporate into your business when determining ideal Wi-Fi coverage solutions, as these devices will use up your bandwidth.

The Kind of Programs and Applications Used

Depending on the industry of your business, the kind of programs and applications performed on a daily basis will affect the kind of Wi-Fi coverage you need. Some industries might require more bandwidth for employees to perform their roles. For example, a field that uses quite a bit of data every day will require more bandwidth than an industry that uses the network to perform straightforward tasks, such as emailing or light (non-research intensive) internet browsing.

If your business doesn’t require complex online activities that use up a lot of data, then you can probably opt for lower bandwidth. However, if your business is in an industry that uses a lot of data, you should consider going with a larger bandwidth. 

The Business’s Budget

For small businesses, thinking about the cost of the Wi-Fi network is important. Choosing Wi-Fi coverage that is inadequate will lead to expensive upgrades in hardware down the road. However, if you’re working with a small budget, you’ll need to consider the needs and growth potential of your business carefully. To ensure that you get the coverage you need at a price you can afford, you should consider which services your business needs and go from there. 

How Do You Set Up a Scalable Network?

For small businesses, choosing a network solution that is scalable is essential to growth. For your Wi-Fi installation, you’ll want to choose an option that fits your current needs, but is also adaptable as you add new employees. 

Why is having a scalable network important? If you don’t have a scalable network, when you add new employee devices to your network, the speed and reliability of your network will decrease. When this happens, you lose out on productivity, which could affect profits and customer relationships.

How do you set up a scalable network? Choosing a professional Wi-Fi installation service ensures that your network solution is reliable and efficient. You’ll want your entire IT infrastructure to be strong and reliable, so going with a professional service provider is the best time and cost-saving solution. 

One of the main factors you’ll need to consider before installing the ideal Wi-Fi coverage for your business is bandwidth. You’ll need to choose the right amount for your Wi-Fi network. What is bandwidth? It’s the rate at which your network can transmit data. So, for most applications and programs it will require a certain amount of data transfer. If there are multiple devices being used to connect to the network, it will require greater bandwidth. So, for small businesses that are acquiring new employees, ensuring that the bandwidth is able to accommodate these devices is essential. 

What happens if there are too many devices connected to your business’s network? Having too many devices connected to your network can cause significant issues in the workplace. Some of the issues your employees or customers might deal with include slow or delayed loading times, buffering, reconnecting devices to compete for bandwidth, and system crashes. For employees trying to do their jobs, dealing with consistently slow speeds will leave them unable to perform their jobs efficiently. This inefficiency can cause serious problems for your business and may affect the recent growth of your business. 

Determining the Ideal Wi-Fi Coverage

Determining the ideal Wi-Fi coverage is essential for businesses that are trying to grow. With many potential downsides of having slow internet speed, businesses will want to ensure that they have adequate Wi-Fi coverage. Adding new employees may have its challenges, but when you consider all of the factors, you’ll be able to find a network solution. 

Determining the ideal Wi-Fi coverage comes down to a few different factors that small businesses should consider. Some of the factors that small businesses should consider include

• The number of employees/customers

• The number of connected devices

• The kind of online activity that will be done

• The budget

With these factors in mind, a business should be able to determine a scalable network solution for their Wi-Fi coverage.
If your small business is looking to expand its team, you should consider your growing network needs. You don’t want to deal with slow internet speeds and all of the challenges that come with it. Working with a professional company that offers network services is the best way to ensure that you are getting stable and reliable Wi-Fi coverage that will fit your business’s needs. We offer network design and installation services that can meet your changing needs. If you are looking for a custom Wi-Fi solution to fit your growing team, get in touch with us to learn more about the services we offer.