It happens to all organizations: even though you’ve paid for good and consistent wireless coverage, your location experiences downtime or periods of lag. Not only is this inconsistency frustrating from a customer service perspective, but it can also be a source of missed revenue depending on how long and frequently your service underperforms or fails.
It may be tempting to resolve wireless performance issues on your own in an effort to save time and money. But before you do, consider the five top most common mistakes businesses make when trying to test their wireless connection.
1. Adopting a Complaint-Driven Model
The most common way that small businesses keep track of their wireless performance is by assuming it works fine. Even during recurring moments of lag, many businesses think this pattern is normal and opt to do nothing about it until their customers begin complaining—or taking their business elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if you resolve the issue soon after, you may not win back the customers who were originally jaded by your intolerable wireless connection. And you never want to give customers a bad impression of your establishment, especially if you’re a new business.
2. Relying on Your Internet Service Provider
Given the amount of money you’re paying your Internet Service Provider (ISP) for a high-quality wireless connection, you may rely on them for solutions to your persistent performance problems. However, we strongly caution against contacting your ISP for assistance without any quantifiable data to back up your claims, as your ISP has a vested interest in telling you that everything is functioning just fine as it is.
3. Relying on the Access Point
Similarly, you may want to rely on what your network’s access point is telling you. But it can’t tell you whose device it didn’t connect with, what the quality of service is, and what the user is experiencing. The only thing your access point can definitively communicate is what kind of service it is currently experiencing right where it is located. So, in essence, your access point is at the wrong end of the system.
4. Focusing Only on Speed
In terms of wireless performance, many organizations focus only on their network speed. However, the picture of strong and reliable connection is multi-faceted. Even though many ISPs emphasize maximum throughput speed when marketing their wireless services, it’s really about reliability, quality of service, how quickly the service connects (latency), and then maximum throughput speed. For example, it may be tempting to pay for 20 MB because your ISP said you needed it, but you may only need 5 MB. Alternatively, your performance may be limited by something other than maximum throughput.
5. Not Understanding Performance Ranges
Wireless performance may vary depending on where your customers congregate in your location and what time of day it is. If you measure performance during a quiet period, when the signal is strong and conditions are optimal, you’ll see that you are performing at 10/10. But during a busy time of day, when your network is being loaded and you happen to be standing in a different place, your service might rank at 4/10.
Usually, performance tends to be measured in times and places when it produces the best results; instead, organizations need to test in different locations throughout the day to get a fuller picture of how their wireless network is actually performing.
Remote Speed Test offers an optimal solution to proactively monitoring your wireless network’s performance so you stay ahead of any recurring issues and foster positive customer relationships. Our solution automatically runs network and app performance tests all day, every day—and these performance results collected by your sensors are delivered conveniently to your smartphone, helping you measure what matters.
Contact us today for more information on our wireless performance monitoring solutions.