In most situations, ETV Software uses coper clad Cat6 networking cable. We tend to shy away from aluminum coated copper cables for durability and longevity reasons. In some cases the copper coating can wear away from the cable which will either greatly deteriorate the cable’s ability to send a clear signal or disable the cable all together.

Not necessarily. Slowness in an internet connection can come from a lot of sources up and down the line.

First, is the service you are trying to access. If Facebook or Hulu is having a bad day at their data centers, no amount of network equipment in your office will fix it.

Second is your Internet Service Provider. ISPs sometimes suffer equipment failures or see their buried lines get cut during construction which can limit your internet speed or disconnect you all together.

Third is your modem and other networking equipment like routers and switches. As technology marches forward, the modem your business has relied upon forever can just be too old to operate at higher speeds. Likewise, older routers and switches can also not be up to the task of providing a fast internet experience.

Another place to look when your network is slow is the cables that connect computers and devices to the internet. Go back far enough, and the cables themselves might not have been designed for higher speed network connections. Cables can also suffer damage over time which could limit your network’s speed.

It is also worth considering how your wifi network is set up. With so many extra wifi devices these days from our smartphones to laptops to things like thermostats and security cameras, the old way of asking a single wifi access point to cover an entire building is quickly becoming the wrong way to do things. These days, mesh networking, which involves placing multiple access points around your building so they can work together to give you the best speed and coverage, can greatly increase both your wifi speeds and coverage.

VOIP phone systems have been becoming more popular over the last few years. They let businesses set up all sorts of advanced phone features like voicemail, call answering menus, and numbers that can ring out to cellphones. One critical pieces of setting up a VOIP system, though, often gets overlooked. And, it’s the phones themselves!

VOIP phones come in a variety of shapes and sizes from very basic phones that only have a dialpad all the way up to phones that run their own applications and can help automate many daily tasks. One of the most important things to consider, though, is what type of network connection your business’ VOIP phones support. On the lower end, more budget friendly phones often only support 10Mbps ethernet. This is fine for just the phone itself, as those speeds are more than enough to handle several calls at once. Where things get tricky is if your office setup sees your network first run to your phone, and then down to your computer, as is the case in many typical business setups.

What happens is your phone works fine, but because it doesn’t support faster network speeds, it can only send out a very slow network connection to any devices connected to it. With most networks now supporting Gigabit speeds (that’s 1,000Mbps), having a computer chained off a slow, budget friendly phone means that your computer is stuck only able to use 10% of your network’s full performance!

The thing is, this kind of thing doesn’t only happen with low end VOIP phones. Sometimes manufactures sneak in the slower networking to reduce the price of mid-level phones too. So, whether you are looking into setting up a new VOIP phone system for your business or you have a VOIP system and are wondering why some or all of your attached network devices are running slowly, take a look at the specs of your phones as a badly speced phone can bring parts of your network to a crawl.

With today’s faster internet speeds, wifi networks have had to change significantly to keep up. Ten years ago, you could cover an entire home or business with a single wifi access point. Now, with every laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone, and thermostat wanting a wifi connection, that single access point that you purchased a few years back simply cannot keep up.

Two get the best wifi speeds and coverage, one needs to look into using multiple wifi access points that form a mesh network. Typically, you have a main access point that’s attached to your internet connection, and then one or more additional access points that simply plug in to power outlets. The main hub talks to the satellite points over one fast, clear channel, then each of those points use a second channel to give out wifi to your devices. They are also smart enough to tell your phone or laptop which point has the best connection so you don’t get stuck talking to the first access point you connected to.

Another thing these mess networks are good at is keeping your wifi running even if one of the points fails. You’ll see a reduction on your wifi speed and coverage until you can replace the unit that failed, but that’s a lot better than losing your only access point and having your entire network go down.

Your standard wifi access point mostly broadcasts its wifi signal in a circle surrounding it. This generally works ok for smaller offices or homes, but does not work so well if you are trying to include a nearby building. You could run and bury a network cable over to your other building, but there are now wifi solutions that are much quicker and easier to set up.

By using a pair of directional antennas, you can extend a wifi network a lot farther than you might think. Instead of transmitting in the typical circle, you point the two antennas directly at each other so that they can send a more powerful narrow beam of wifi from one point to the other. This works great for disconnected offices, sheds with garages or work benches, and even places like getting wifi from a home down to a boathouse.

The most important requirement is that you have line of sight over to the location you are attempting to beam your wifi signal to.

It is temping to save money by purchasing only the networking equipment you need for today. One thing we have seen in businesses time and time again, however, is that the routers, switches, and servers that were just enough to handle current levels of business quickly get outgrown and can be expensive to replace down the road.

What we always suggest is that businesses access their current needs, but then purchase equipment that goes beyond simply matching those needs. As growing businesses add employees and services they tend to add computers which means they need more network capacity, they need more storage space for backups, they need faster servers for those new employees to connect to. By going with what will work today, they can quickly find themselves buying both what they needed today and then rebuying faster or better versions of the same equipment when they reach tomorrow far more quickly than they thought they would.

In the end, it’s almost always a better idea to purchase a little more than you need right now, if only because the setup cost of installing your equipment twice within a few years will easily outpace the cost of buying your equipment with expansion in mind.

Back in 2005, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 did not ship with standard wifi. Players who wanted to hook up their 360s to their wifi networks needed to buy a special external adapter. It turns out, Microsoft probably had it right the first time. As we use wifi for more and more purposes, (many new thermostats connect to our wifi networks these days!), it actually gets worse and worse for gaming.

Why is wifi so bad for gaming? It’s pretty simple, really. Only one device can talk on a wifi channel at any given time. To make this work your phone, PlayStation, thermostat, tv, etc, all broadcast their next message after waiting a random amount of time in the hopes that they will be the only one trying to talk at that moment. All your devices need to send something across your network many many times each second, so it is inevitable that two devices collide with each other when they try and talk at the same time. When this happens, each device again waits a random amount of time and then tries again. This wait is just a few tiny fractions of a second, but it adds up quickly.

A network with a dozen connected devices will already start to see some decreased performance. This trying and retrying doesn’t hurt your top end speed so much as it affects the timeliness of internet signals reaching the devices they are looking for. In gaming, a network delay of a few milliseconds can be perceptible to high end gamers. And the real problem? Your wifi network is probably not the only one nearby. All the devices on all the networks you can see have the potential to interfere with each other. For people that live in tightly packed neighborhoods or in apartments, the amount of network lag introduced by dozens of devices multiplied by dozens of networks can be bad enough that not only does it affect fast paced gaming, it can also badly affect streaming tv shows and movies.

In general, anything on your network that can use a wired connection should use a wired connection. It’s often not practical to run cables all across your house or apartment, but connecting your gaming console or pc directly to your internet modem or router is almost a must to get the best performance.