A decade ago, business internet was mainly used for email and occasional file downloads. Most business-critical applications lived on a server in the building. The internet connection mattered, but it wasn't the lifeblood of daily operations. That's no longer true for most UK businesses.
Today, Microsoft 365 — email, Teams calls, SharePoint files, cloud storage — runs over your internet connection. Your phone system may be VoIP, which runs over your internet connection. Your accounts software, your CRM, your project management tools — cloud-hosted, running over your internet connection. If that connection is slow, unreliable, or poorly specified, everything suffers.
The Difference Between Business and Consumer Broadband
Many small businesses run on a standard consumer broadband connection — FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) or FTTP (fibre to the premises) taken on a residential or small-business tariff. These connections are adequate for light use, but they have characteristics that make them poorly suited to business-critical workloads.
Contention
Consumer broadband connections are contended — the bandwidth shown in your package is the maximum you can receive, shared with other users on the same local infrastructure. At peak times (typically evenings and midday), your effective speed can drop significantly. For a home user streaming Netflix, this is a minor inconvenience. For a business running Teams calls and cloud applications during business hours, consistent degradation at exactly the times you need reliability is a serious problem.
Asymmetric Speeds
Consumer broadband is designed for downloading — receiving data from the internet. Upload speeds are typically a fraction of download speeds. A 200Mbps download connection might have only 20Mbps upload. For businesses doing significant cloud work — syncing files to SharePoint, backing up to cloud storage, making video calls where you're both sending and receiving — the upload constraint is often the binding bottleneck, not the download speed.
Service Level Agreements
Consumer broadband comes with no meaningful SLA. If the line goes down, your provider will aim to fix it within a number of working days. Business-grade connectivity with a proper SLA commits the provider to response and fix times that are measured in hours, often with financial penalties for breach. When your internet connection is what enables your business to operate, the difference matters.
Example: A Derby-based professional services firm was running their twelve staff on a standard 80Mbps FTTC connection. Teams calls were dropping out. File syncs were slow. Occasional complete outages lasted several days with no priority support. They moved to a dedicated FTTP business connection with 1Gbps symmetric speed and a 4-hour fix SLA. The total monthly cost difference was less than £100. The productivity improvement was immediate and significant.
What Connection Types Are Actually Available?
FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet)
The most widespread business broadband in the UK. Fibre runs to the green street cabinet, and the final stretch to your premises is over the existing copper phone line. Speeds typically range from 40Mbps to 80Mbps download, with much lower upload. Adequate for very small teams with light cloud usage; increasingly insufficient for businesses running VoIP, Teams video, and heavy cloud workloads.
FTTP (Fibre to the Premises)
Full fibre runs directly to your building. Speeds from 100Mbps to 1Gbps (or higher) with much more balanced upload. FTTP is now available in most urban and many suburban areas across the East Midlands, including most Derby, Nottingham, and Leicester postcodes. Business FTTP from providers like BT, Virgin, or independent fibre providers typically includes stronger SLAs than consumer FTTP. This is the right default choice for most SMEs where full fibre is available.
Leased Line
A dedicated, uncontended fibre connection from your premises directly to the provider's network — not shared with any other users. Speed is symmetric (same upload and download), guaranteed, and consistent. Leased lines are significantly more expensive than FTTP, but for businesses where consistent performance and high upload bandwidth are business-critical — architectural firms, creative agencies, businesses running their own hosted infrastructure — the cost is justified. Typical speeds start at 100Mbps and go up to 10Gbps.
4G/5G Backup
Rather than a primary connection, a 4G or 5G router is an increasingly common secondary connection — failover that automatically activates if your primary line goes down. For businesses where even a few hours of internet outage represents significant cost, a mobile data failover connection provides continuity for email, Teams, and critical cloud access while the main line is restored.
How to Know If Your Connection Is the Problem
The symptoms of a connectivity constraint aren't always obvious, because they often present as application slowness rather than internet slowness. Teams calls that drop or freeze, SharePoint syncs that run slowly, video meetings that degrade partway through — these are connectivity symptoms, but they're easy to misattribute to the application or the device.
A few things worth checking:
- Run a speed test during business hours (not at 9pm) using a tool like fast.com or speedtest.net — and specifically check your upload speed, not just download. If upload is below 10–15Mbps and you have more than a handful of staff on Teams and cloud applications, it's a constraint.
- Check whether symptoms are consistent or time-of-day dependent. If things are worse at midday and again in the early afternoon, contention is likely the culprit.
- Check what proportion of your workloads are cloud-based. If Microsoft 365, cloud accounting, CRM, and VoIP are all running over the same connection, the total bandwidth demand may simply exceed what a basic broadband product delivers.
- Ask what happens when the internet goes down. If the answer is "everything stops," your resilience posture is worth reviewing alongside the connectivity question.
VoIP and Connectivity: A Specific Consideration
If your business phone system runs over VoIP — which includes most modern cloud phone systems, including Microsoft Teams Phone — call quality is directly dependent on internet connection quality, and specifically on something called jitter and latency rather than raw speed.
Jitter is the variability in the time it takes data packets to arrive. High jitter on a VoIP call manifests as choppy, robotic audio or calls that drop mid-conversation. It's caused by network congestion and inconsistent routing — things that are more pronounced on consumer broadband connections during peak hours.
Businesses running VoIP on an unsuitable connection often attribute the audio quality problems to the phone system or the provider, when the actual fix is a better-specified internet connection with Quality of Service (QoS) configuration that prioritises VoIP traffic over other uses.
What's Worth Doing
If you haven't reviewed your connectivity in the past two years — or if you've grown your team, moved to more cloud-based tools, or adopted VoIP since your current connection was set up — it's worth a proper assessment.
The questions to answer are: what speed and reliability does your current connection actually deliver in practice? What does your business actually demand from it? Is the gap between the two causing real-world problems? And what would the right connection cost compared to the productivity cost of the current one?
In most cases, the right connectivity solution is not dramatically more expensive than an unsuitable one. The cost of poor connectivity — in slow tools, dropped calls, and staff frustration — tends to be significantly higher than the upgrade.