Improving Office Broadband Reliability

[JamPotato]

Hi all,

I work for a medium-sized business (~40 people total, on-site and remote). We have BT business broadband with a BT Business Smart Hub, getting about 170Mbps. It's dropped a couple times recently, solved by restarting the router (and in fact it has restarted itself a couple times too). I talked to BT support, and as far as I understand them, they think it's a bandwidth issue. We've got ~70 devices on our network daily. So I have a few questions:

1. Is 170Mbps enough for what we're doing? We're running a voip server, and supporting about 20 staff with laptops, mobile phones, and voip-phones connected to the network.
2. Should we invest in a professional router? It seems to me that bandwidth is not causing our internet to drop, surely it would simply cause it to slow down. However I can understand if the BT router's capabilities for being a router are not up to the task, and something from DrayTek would solve things.
3. BT support told me to limit the network to 10 devices, or "take another connection for other devices". Does this make any sense to anyone? Is this about bandwidth, or some inherent limit on connections through broadband? Or the router?

Any advice would be great!

 

[ctrlbrk]

Any advice would be great!

You should get someone to check your router logs to understand what may have happened when it crashed.

 

[Alcom IT]

The only way to know for sure is to see what your usage is over time. It may be too many devices, too much traffic, physical line problems or it may be the router is starting to fail.

As a diagnostic we would normally start by looking at the router logs or network monitoring logs to see how much bandwidth you have been using. If it's a faulty router you could look at asking BT for a replacement router to see if that resolves the issue.

 

[forevergroup]

Hi there!

Sorry to hear about this issue, it sounds frustrating especially when you’re reliant on VoIP.

You had me at ‘BT support’.

Bandwidth utilisation by itself doesn’t cause a router to spontaneously reboot.

I would expect cheaper hardware to struggle with client device volumes, though.

It does sound like you’ve outgrown a ‘free’ ISP router, for all sorts of reasons.

Examples being lack of visibility, control, reliability, and troubleshooting capability.

We are a multi-accredited Cisco partner, if you’d like some free further advice on this please do feel free to reach out to me directly.

 

[KM-Tiger]

As other have said, it's important to diagnose what the issue is before arriving at a solution to solve it.

Out of interest have you VOIP calls dropping or the audio breaking up? (Other than the router restarts). Is there any QOS applied anywhere?