“It’s slow” is not a diagnosis: it is a symptom. And it is almost always blamed on the provider, who is the most convenient suspect. In our experience, the blame is actually spread quite widely.
The four usual culprits
- The Wi-Fi, not the line. Patchy coverage, channels swamped by the neighbours or ageing access points. You can spot it because over cable everything works fine.
- A machine saturating the network: a backup badly scheduled at midday, a mass update or a compromised computer.
- The provider’s router, which in many offices is the bottleneck: it cannot cope with a company’s simultaneous connections.
- The line, yes, but very often because of the upload, not the download: video calls and cloud backups travel upwards.
What to measure, and why the speed test on your phone will not do
A one-off test measures one instant from one place. The problem is almost never constant: it shows up at eleven, when everybody is online, or on Tuesdays, when the backup runs. You need to measure continuously:
- Real throughput upstream and downstream, over a period of days.
- Latency and jitter, which is what makes a video call break up even when the throughput is fine.
- Packet loss: a sustained 1 % is already noticeable, and it never shows up in a speed test.
- Saturation by time slot, to see whether the problem keeps to a schedule.
How to get your provider to act
A ticket saying “it’s slow for me” closes itself. A report with dated measurements, with packet loss and with a comparison against the throughput you are paying for does not. You have to ask for the fault report with an incident number and refer to the service level agreement in your contract, if there is one. Business lines usually have one; consumer lines dressed up as business ones do not.
The measurement report is the only thing that turns “it’s slow” into a fault that somebody is obliged to fix.
And if the line is fine
Then it is time to look inside: cabling, network electronics, Wi-Fi and the machines themselves. That is the part almost nobody has ever reviewed, and where the real problem usually is.
