What Growing Businesses Get Wrong About Internet Upgrades

Growth is a good problem to have. More staff. More customers. More cloud services. More opportunity.

But time and again, we see expanding businesses make the same mistake: they treat an internet upgrade as a simple speed increase — when in reality, it should be a strategic infrastructure decision.

Here’s what often goes wrong.

1. Chasing Headline Speeds Instead of Reliability

It’s easy to be drawn in by “900 Mbps” or “gigabit” promises. Faster sounds better.

But most day-to-day business frustrations aren’t caused by a lack of peak speed. They’re caused by:

Dropouts
Packet loss
Latency
Contention
Poor Wi-Fi design

A stable, well-configured 300 Mbps business connection will outperform an unreliable 900 Mbps service every time. Reliability keeps teams productive. Speed alone does not.

2. Ignoring Upstream Requirements

Modern businesses don’t just download — they upload constantly.

Cloud backups, Microsoft 365, VoIP, CRM systems, file sharing and video meetings all depend on strong, symmetrical upload capacity.

Many growing firms upgrade download speed but overlook upload performance, especially when moving from residential-style services to true business connectivity.

If your staff are complaining about poor Teams or Webex calls, it’s rarely just “bandwidth” — it’s usually upload performance or network design.

3. Forgetting the Internal Network

Upgrading the broadband circuit without reviewing the internal network is like installing a bigger engine in a car with worn tyres.

Common oversights include:

Old switches that can’t handle higher throughput
Routers not configured for QoS (Quality of Service)
Poorly placed Wi-Fi access points
No VLAN separation for voice and data

An internet upgrade should prompt a review of the entire setup — not just the line coming into the building.

4. No Backup Strategy

Growth increases dependency.

When five people rely on the internet, an outage is inconvenient.
When twenty-five rely on it, it’s expensive.

Yet many businesses upgrade their primary line and still have no automatic failover or 4G/5G backup.

Resilience should scale with growth. If downtime now costs more than it did two years ago, your connectivity strategy needs to reflect that.

5. Treating It as a Transaction Instead of a Plan

Connectivity should align with:

Staff growth forecasts
Increased cloud adoption
New premises or hybrid working
Cybersecurity requirements
Voice platform changes

An upgrade should be part of a wider review — not just a response to complaints.

A More Sensible Approach

When a business is expanding, the right questions are:

How many users will we have in 12–24 months?
What systems are we moving to the cloud?
How critical is uptime to revenue?
What does one hour offline actually cost us?

Speed matters — but design, resilience and proper configuration matter more.

At KIPCOM Limited (Kingston Technologies Group), we work with businesses across Hull and the Humber region to make sure upgrades are done properly — not just quickly.

If your business is growing and you’re unsure whether your connectivity is genuinely fit for purpose, I’m always happy to have a straightforward conversation.

Rod Walker
Tel: 01482 291292
Email: rod@ktgl.co.uk
Web: http://www.ktgl.co.uk

#BusinessBroadband #ConnectivityMatters #HullBusiness #VoIP #GrowingBusiness #KTGL