Ask most business owners how fast their internet is and they will tell you the number on the bill. Ask them whether it is enough and you get a shrug. The connection either feels fine or it does not, and when it does not, the usual move is to call the provider and buy a bigger number.
Sometimes that works. Often it does not, because the thing making your office feel slow is not the thing you just paid more for. Bandwidth is one of the easiest IT expenses to overbuy and one of the easiest to misdiagnose. Here is how to figure out what your office actually needs, in plain terms, so the next conversation with your provider is a short one.
The Advertised Speed Is Not the Number That Matters Most
Advertised speed is a ceiling, not a promise. It tells you how wide the road is at its widest. It says nothing about traffic, potholes, or whether the on ramp near your building is any good.
For context on where the floor sits: the Federal Communications Commission announced in March 2024 that it had adopted a fixed broadband benchmark of 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload, which it described as a four-fold increase over the 25/3 Mbps benchmark the Commission set in 2015. That is a definition of adequate service, not a recommendation for a busy office. But note that the FCC named an upload number at all. That is the half of the equation businesses ignore.
Upload Is the Half Nobody Buys
Most business plans sold to small offices are lopsided. Big download, small upload. That made sense when the internet was something you consumed. It makes much less sense now.
Think about what your office sends out. Your face on a video call. Files going to a cloud folder. Nightly backups. Your phone system, if it is hosted. Screen shares. All of it rides on upload, and upload is the smaller pipe.
Microsoft’s Teams network documentation, updated in 2026, publishes bandwidth figures per endpoint in kilobits per second. For video in meetings, it lists 150 up as the minimum, 2,500 up as recommended, and 4,000 up for best performance. In everyday units, one person on a recommended-quality meeting video stream is asking for roughly 2.5 megabits per second going out of your building. Audio is far lighter, listed at 58 up for the same tier, which is why a call that falls apart on video often sounds fine once everyone drops their cameras.
If your plan gives you 300 down and 10 up, you do not have a 300 megabit connection for the purposes of a busy conference room. You have a 10 megabit one.
Latency and Jitter, Without the Math
Speed measures how much can move. Latency and jitter measure how well it moves. They are different problems and buying more speed does not fix them.
- Latency is delay. How long it takes a piece of data to get there and back. Think of it as mail delivery time. A wide highway does not help if the post office is three states away.
- Jitter is inconsistency in that delay. Some letters arrive in a day, some in four, some in bunches. Your ear notices this instantly on a phone call, which is why jitter is the usual culprit behind choppy, robotic audio.
- Packet loss is mail that never arrives. Small amounts are normal and invisible. Bursts of it cause audio to cut out mid-sentence.
Microsoft’s call quality documentation for Teams, updated in 2026, treats an audio stream as poor when average jitter exceeds 30 milliseconds, packet loss rate exceeds 10 percent, or round trip time exceeds 500 milliseconds, and states that “only one metric needs to exceed the defined threshold” for that classification. Notice that none of those three thresholds is a speed. You can have a gigabit connection and terrible calls.
So How Many Video Calls Does Your Connection Really Support?
Do the arithmetic, then leave room. Using Microsoft’s recommended tier of 2,500 kilobits up per meeting video stream, ten people on camera at once is roughly 25 megabits per second leaving your building, before email, backups, or anyone downloading anything.
Two things people get wrong here. First, Microsoft’s documentation counts endpoints, not humans, and notes that if someone joins a meeting on both a computer and a mobile device, that is two endpoints. Conference rooms with a room system plus laptops in the room add up fast.
Second, never size a connection to run at full capacity. A road at 100 percent utilization is a traffic jam, not an efficient road. Plan for your realistic peak and add meaningful headroom on top. If the honest peak is 25 megabits up, a 10 megabit upload is not marginal, it is broken, and a 30 megabit upload is still tight.
Shared Versus Dedicated Service
Most business internet is shared. You and everyone else on the segment draw from the same pool, which is why speeds can be excellent at 7am and disappointing at 2pm. The advertised figure is a best case under good conditions.
Dedicated service, often sold as dedicated internet access, reserves capacity for you alone. It is typically symmetric, meaning upload matches download, and usually comes with a written service level agreement covering uptime and repair response. It costs meaningfully more, and prices vary so much by address and carrier that any figure we printed would be wrong for somebody. Get quotes for your building and confirm what the agreement guarantees.
Our contrarian take: most small offices do not need dedicated service. What they usually need is a plan with real upload capacity and a second connection from a different provider for failover. Two independent paths protect you from the failure mode that actually happens, which is one line going down. We wrote about planning for that in the cloud can go down and what that means for your business.
Is It the Connection, or Is It Your Own Network?
Before you buy anything, find out where the slowdown lives. A few cheap checks separate the two.
- Test at the router, not at a desk. Run a speed test from a device plugged in directly next to the router. If that result is good and desk results are bad, the problem is inside your building.
- Compare wired to wireless. If a cable fixes it, you have a Wi-Fi coverage or interference issue, not a bandwidth issue.
- Check whether it is one person or everyone. One person is almost always local: a bad cable, a bad port, an overloaded laptop. Everyone at once points upstream.
- Watch the clock. Slowdowns that hit the same time daily usually mean contention or a scheduled backup, not an undersized plan.
- Ask what else is on the line. Cloud backups running during business hours, security cameras uploading footage, and large software updates can quietly eat your upload.
The Bottom Line
Right-sizing your internet is not about buying the biggest number. It is about knowing your realistic peak upload, understanding that responsiveness and speed are different things, and confirming that the bottleneck is actually outside your walls before you spend money on it.
Plenty of offices pay for download capacity they never touch while starving on upload. Plenty of others blame a perfectly good connection for a switch, a cable, or a backup job. Neither fix starts with a bigger bill. If you would rather not work through this alone, that is one of the things a good partner handles, as we covered in what to look for in an IT partner.
We help small and mid-sized businesses across Denton County measure what they actually use, read the fine print on service agreements, and stop overpaying for the wrong half of the connection. Contact us today.
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