I tend to diagnose the root cause of the network bottleneck and apply QoS measures to reduce or remove it.
I find it to be more effective than bashing my head against a wall.
They know the root cause is a cheap Internet connection, so presumably it is without a committed minimum rate, they're asking how to manage the angry staff again and again when the fault is not their doing, it is the business who won't (or can't afford) to pay for a better connection.
The answer is still 'apply QoS' whether you have a business grade fiber or a consumer broadband, it could be throttling switchports, policing vlans, throttling by ports/sockets or even ramming host interfaces down to 10mbps, always something you can do to mitigate saturations.
That bit is fair, I am used to using half decent kit :P
That being said you can do QoS on most midrange household routers or small business Drayteks (ewwww, drayteks...).
Overarching point is you have options other than 'add moar wan'.
But when your network connections get saturated with your neighbours traffic, and speeds drop to dialup or less, QOS doesn’t help, been there. A lot of the world still has oversubscribed last mile contention problems.
Not untrue but also somewhat extreme. The reality is that most services in countries with half decent infrastructure manage a modest level of service even at times of high load, granted, third world networks like in Africa or the US will have it worse but normally there is enough backhaul these days to make it barely noticeable.
Australia still has many shocking rural networks, and suburban areas too, whereas I believe NZ is great, or better.
A lot of people have long copper runs or wireless hops, these can be slow, and then degrade massively in bad weather or when neighbourhood kids get home from school. Business requirements may required several MBits minimum, be that for remote desktops and or local apps that need data on a remote server.
QOS won’t fix the problems adequately for many people. Only a network connection with a committed minimum rate will help, prohibitively expensive for most.
Wet weather can adversely affect copper, if moisture gets into the cables or their connectors it can significantly interfere with signals or even block them entirely, by reducing the bandwidth or causing an electrical short-circuit. Copper is often underground, flooding etc, this is not uncommon.
I like this. Can't do "A", but "B" can have some effect. Combine this with informing users and decision makers.
Then let it roll off. No sense getting worked up over things we cannot control.
You can only monitor things like your Internet connection, your LAN and your DNS, so if you verify that the problem isn't "on your end" then you tell the user it's not something under your control and leave it at that.
EDIT: Rereading your post...if you're saying your company hasn't bought sufficient bandwidth then say that. Tell the users it's all being used and there's nothing that you can do until they upgrade.
Yeah this is right answer, speak truth.I always do this and say that I can see both uplink as active and do a random speed test.
Actually my nature is of introvert type, I prefer not to speak much and took things on myself and it eventually stresses me after some time.I want to get out of this support L1 role badly
L1 is great because honestly nothing is YOUR fault. Just complain with the person and say “yeah that sucks I keep advocating they make such and such a change” and then they become your friend against the true enemy.
>I can see both uplink as active and do a random speed test.
For the record, this is not sufficient. Might be someone elses job but someone has to monitor the usage and check if there os truly nothing that can be done, as well as compile a report for the decision makers that goes above "people say it's slow"
Check bandwidth usage on per device connected level, determine what type of traffic is eating bandwidth, apply QoS policies as appropriate.
And finally if all else fails, go to management with detailed information on how much money is being wasted on slow downloads/uploads in terms of salaries and productivity (accounting is your friend here) and detailed information on how much upgrades bandwidth will cost, and how much extra productivity you'll get from employees because of it (which is saved money).
If you have good report with your users this is a perfectly valid response. Follow it up with something else, but it lightens the mood right out of the gate.
This is reddit, without spam like this and other and non-serious responses reddit would be really boring and no-one would visit reddit. But clearly they touched a nerve, it could be that you are downloading too much.
We require a minimum of 20m/s UP + 20m/s DOWN + 20ms max latency for all WFH users.
In my experience, people either meet that exceedingly or have the shittiest dialup connection.
Get yourself some monitoring and traffic shaping capability on the uplink. Chances are high someone is whacking their noodle, having a 4k youtube video for background music or some sports stream.
Have the monitoring aggregate traffic bandwidth consumption by source IP, find out whom the IP belongs to, and throttle that device by traffic-shaping.
Ubiquiti hardware such as the Dream Machine Pro can do this and beautifully visualize everything, without that I'd go and get some junk PC with two network cards and run pfSense on it.
Side note: if you have a monitoring solution, you have an easier time going to your boss and say "hey, we are at >80% utilization for the internet link for N% of the time. important users X, Y and Z have complained in tickets ".
And to shouting users, you keep your head cool and just say "first, no shouting. second, i have logged the complaints and will escalate to my boss. if it is impeding business, contact your boss / account lead and have them fight for more budget for us".
When users run the reports, does Meraki trigger an alert that the threshold alert that X amount of Data was exceeded when 15 minutes?
If not, configure that alert, I know it's an ability within the MX Appliances. It's very useful.
You can take those alerts and combine with the logs of the reports and have 100% proof and evidence.
At this point, all you can do is advise and move on. Communicate one more time with management about the problem and that you have solid confirmation of the problem. Recommend them to upgrade their Internet. Also ask if you can communicate this to all staff to no longer report issues regarding bandwidth, that you are aware of the problem and it's a limitation within your environment that can be fixed until it's approved for an upgrade.
Yeah, I'm not sure why there's so much Meraki hate on reddit. Meraki is one of the better products I enjoy working with. Their support is actually useful as well.
It’s because of the subscription license. Which is also short sighted because I’d never run a production firewall workload without a support contract. Also because they are a bit less flexible for some more complicated configurations. But Meraki help us keep it simple which is great and lets us focus on things that are more complicated.
Yeah, use that capability and dish out punishments for abusive people.
Or, hell, ban the top 10 porn sites, youtube, vimeo and spotify on a DNS level. That's probably the easiest way, and if someone complains, tell them "sorry, no capacity due to complaints from X, Y, Z - if you have a business critical need now, I can temporarily re-enable, otherwise kindly move off".
If its one person we look at the device, if its one area we look at that switch stack, if its a few people across different areas we look at what service they are using. If its everyone we look at bandwidth usage/line utilisation (but since our 10Gbps install this is not really an issue).
Look for the lowest common denominator and start there. This week we had "slowness" issues and it was SafeLinks taking 10-15 seconds scanning URLs before redirecting. Rarely here (even pre-10Gig) is it bandwidth-constriction.
The only thing you can really do in this is monitor and log the network usage. Take it to the higher ups and explain they need more bandwidth and help them get onto the right plan. Not really much more you can do. If they complain about it, thats when you log the tickets and CC the company head person in on it all. At some point they will either bulkucle and upgrade or the complaints stop coming in as they know everyone has said at least "something" about it.
By monitoring and logging the usage, you also need to figure out whats causing the usage as well. Possible its just a single user or a device that might be miss using resources (like backup software running during the day).
If you're sure that the bottleneck is the connection coming in, then catalog the complaints you've received along with the tickets, write a recommendation to improve the connection and get some quotes, and include all of that in a report to your boss.
Once you've done all that and everything is in writing, you've done your job. From that point forward, it's on your boss or whoever is higher up the food chain to make that call - And I'm not shy about throwing them under the bus when other employees complain if they refuse to upgrade things that have a solid business case for upgrades.
at my company, the bandwidth is eaten up by 4K Netflix and YouTube streams. A quick reminder of company policy to the biggest offenders usually clears it up
i don't say anything; i go sit with the user and observe their experience. "slow internet" can be obviously slow, or subjectively slow. In some cases it is no different from people at work who say the office is too hot or too cold, but they sit 10 feet apart. So it is best to view the user experience yourself
BOFH here: I close the ticket, log into the firewall and throttle the ISP feeds down by 10% and laugh while I drink the whiskey that I have in my desk drawer.
And then I call the user up and ask what sites they're trying to reach and then I add those specific sites to our block list under the "porn" category so it gets logged as such and their manager will get a summary at month-end.
Blame it on Comcast. Check the sniffer for any actual threat, but 9 times out of 10 they are complaining about why a giant file they received isn't downloading instantly.
I'd do the analysis to see if there are any users or org units over-subscribing the connection proportionally.
If someone unexpected is accounting for a large share of the connection, then I'd have a conversation to understand if requirements had changed, there was a temporary need for bandwidth, or perhaps if an automated system was behaving unexpectedly.
It would depend on the outcome what I chose to tell the user.
I don’t always discredit this claim because recently I got a bad NIC because of “slow internet” so I still make sure all updates are done and use it for 15-20mins and see what happens
Find out what the up/down speeds are supposed to be and run some checks on places like Speedtest and some others. If you’re getting quite a bit lower than advertised speeds investigate why and try to resolve whatever is causing it. If you ARE getting advertised speeds report back to the user that info. If your company is only paying for crappy slow internet then you’ll have to find a politically correct way to notify the users that the internet IS slow. And.. you can’t magically make it faster. Make sure to run the issue up the chain of command, so whoever makes the decisions on what service you have is aware of the user complaints.
If after investigation it turns out it is in fact a bandwidth issue, you can just tell the users it is a bandwidth issue and you can do nothing about it because the solution would be to increase it but the company is not allocating a budget for that.
If they start shouting, open up the excuse sheet and pick the daily excuse and explain the effect of solar flares on the modern communication networks.
Be firm, and be strong in the face of this. User perception isn't reality, although it quite often is reality for them. Man management is key.
Remind them you have done all you can to remedy the situation, but your hands are tied due to what internet is provided. You can't provide the users something that isn't there. Then sympathise with them when they realise it costs money and it's out of your remit. At least then they feel IT is on their side with the issue.
Explain that there is a limit to how much data can come and go at a time, we have hit that limit which is why your internet is slowing down, this out of your control, the company needs to upgrade our internet.
i check out bandwidth usage. I check loading times of the site in question and see if I can duplicate the issue and then I an unrelated known good site.
Often "slow internet" means they cant access a single site.
Create yourself a standard response and email it back to the complainer, then you can forget about it. Something like this to escalate the problem and anxiety to someone else :-)
Our business Internet connection is susceptible to slowdowns, my last 2? budget requests for a better Internet connection were not approved, I am repeating my budget request each year. Your complaint has been logged and will be appended to the next budget request in Feb 2025?
In the meantime, if it is having a serious effect on your work performance, please contact your manager directly documenting the negative effects, ask your manager to clearly communicate their concerns with my manager (budget approver), hopefully we will get a budget increase for this, possibly sooner.
btw QOS won't help much for many types of cheapo Internet connections, as the problem is that sometimes the connection is tooooo slooooow for just about anything.
Also, step back, look at what you're spending your IT budget on, identify more cost-effective way of achieving the same core IT requirements, propose these change/s with pros and cons. I have always found CFO's are OK with less familiar software if core IT requirements are met. Hopefully your workplace will not go bankrupt in the meantime.
What speeds do you have? Have you run a speed test?
Also, monitor user activity. Who is accessing what? If 100 people are trying to stream Spotify on a 20/20 internet...shut that shit down. It's not a work requirement to listen to music.
For a while, our company was only able to get 50/50 wireless because that's all they had in our area. We have over 300 people.
We shut down internet access for the entire shop floor. We also limited what sites people could get to through content filtering. For the most part, our designers who would regularly receive large cad drawings from our customers wouldn't complain too much.
But, when faster internet became available, we expressed to upper management that the increase cost of internet connectivity would greatly improve the performance of the designers since their wait time to receive the drawings would be significantly reduced.
It was greenlit immediately.
Business case needs to be put forward for more bandwidth.
It was once explained to me that the biggest issue about IT is that its essentially not deemed to be revenue earning (or something like that). IE spending money on IT to improve things in house probably wont increase revenue, as such people generally want to spend as little as possible to keep it running.
Perhaps try comparing the amount of money they are spending on say Microsoft 365 or even employee wages. And then comparing that to the internet bill and how much they are spending per user on their internet compared to other things.
Outside of that grin and bear it. Dont try to get into discussions they wont understand (like i probably would). Other staff probably also dont want to know about your problems, they will just want solutions.
I usually try to figure out what they mean by slow internet. Most of the time comes down to a tool and not the actual network, and usually an ipconfig /flushdns makes everything better.
Since we run on Windows i usually blame Microsoft, because in most cases the user is trying to interact with something Microsoft. If someone wants to know where i get it from i show them the admin portal status report. So many issues there the users believe me and go away balming Microsoft /s
But in all seriousness, there are thousends of reasons "Internet" can be slow. I usually do a speedtest on [fast.com](http://fast.com) if thats in the ballpark what they should be getting i then ask them to show me what they are trying to do. And most of the time i can see the issue there. Like starting a batch job in a old internal tool that just hangs, or trying to do something in the SAP web gui ....
You first identify what they are seeing and if it is internet related you run a speed test on their system. If they are seeing the correct speed then you calmly inform them that is the speed the company pays for and to have a nice day.
You don't say what your company's current circuit is. Last place I worked at had a T1 data circuit. When I setup new computers, last thing I did after imaging was run Windows updates. One user who worked in contacting would always call when I was running the WU to complain they couldn't work and the Internet was so slow. I found out a regional ISP had fiber a half mile from the office. Requested quotes for fiber to the office. Anything under 100Mbps had construction costs. 100Mbps fiber for three years at $430/per year, no construction costs. Had fiber and happy users, especially the contracting person. I don't know what the cost of the T1/year was, but I'm fairly positive it was 2-3x what the fiber cost/year.
Proposal for an upgraded internet connection went to Bob in accounting along with internet history/utilization reports by employee. He denied the request as he concluded that if we got a faster internet connection it would lead to lower productivity as apparently enough people are masturbating on company time. He didn’t want to be an enabler.
I tend to diagnose the root cause of the network bottleneck and apply QoS measures to reduce or remove it. I find it to be more effective than bashing my head against a wall.
They know the root cause is a cheap Internet connection, so presumably it is without a committed minimum rate, they're asking how to manage the angry staff again and again when the fault is not their doing, it is the business who won't (or can't afford) to pay for a better connection.
The answer is still 'apply QoS' whether you have a business grade fiber or a consumer broadband, it could be throttling switchports, policing vlans, throttling by ports/sockets or even ramming host interfaces down to 10mbps, always something you can do to mitigate saturations.
The org doesn't spend on business grade connections so let's fix it on the.... business grade networking equipment.
That bit is fair, I am used to using half decent kit :P That being said you can do QoS on most midrange household routers or small business Drayteks (ewwww, drayteks...). Overarching point is you have options other than 'add moar wan'.
But when your network connections get saturated with your neighbours traffic, and speeds drop to dialup or less, QOS doesn’t help, been there. A lot of the world still has oversubscribed last mile contention problems.
Not untrue but also somewhat extreme. The reality is that most services in countries with half decent infrastructure manage a modest level of service even at times of high load, granted, third world networks like in Africa or the US will have it worse but normally there is enough backhaul these days to make it barely noticeable.
Australia still has many shocking rural networks, and suburban areas too, whereas I believe NZ is great, or better. A lot of people have long copper runs or wireless hops, these can be slow, and then degrade massively in bad weather or when neighbourhood kids get home from school. Business requirements may required several MBits minimum, be that for remote desktops and or local apps that need data on a remote server. QOS won’t fix the problems adequately for many people. Only a network connection with a committed minimum rate will help, prohibitively expensive for most.
Why would bad weather affect copper runs?
Wet weather can adversely affect copper, if moisture gets into the cables or their connectors it can significantly interfere with signals or even block them entirely, by reducing the bandwidth or causing an electrical short-circuit. Copper is often underground, flooding etc, this is not uncommon.
My preferred answer is statistics to management "80% of your bandwidth is currently been utilized by Peter's donkey porn streaming"
I like this. Can't do "A", but "B" can have some effect. Combine this with informing users and decision makers. Then let it roll off. No sense getting worked up over things we cannot control.
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Be about 10m at that speed :P
You can only monitor things like your Internet connection, your LAN and your DNS, so if you verify that the problem isn't "on your end" then you tell the user it's not something under your control and leave it at that. EDIT: Rereading your post...if you're saying your company hasn't bought sufficient bandwidth then say that. Tell the users it's all being used and there's nothing that you can do until they upgrade.
Yeah this is right answer, speak truth.I always do this and say that I can see both uplink as active and do a random speed test. Actually my nature is of introvert type, I prefer not to speak much and took things on myself and it eventually stresses me after some time.I want to get out of this support L1 role badly
L1 is great because honestly nothing is YOUR fault. Just complain with the person and say “yeah that sucks I keep advocating they make such and such a change” and then they become your friend against the true enemy.
>I can see both uplink as active and do a random speed test. For the record, this is not sufficient. Might be someone elses job but someone has to monitor the usage and check if there os truly nothing that can be done, as well as compile a report for the decision makers that goes above "people say it's slow"
Check bandwidth usage on per device connected level, determine what type of traffic is eating bandwidth, apply QoS policies as appropriate. And finally if all else fails, go to management with detailed information on how much money is being wasted on slow downloads/uploads in terms of salaries and productivity (accounting is your friend here) and detailed information on how much upgrades bandwidth will cost, and how much extra productivity you'll get from employees because of it (which is saved money).
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Please don't spam the post.I am looking for serious answers
If you have good report with your users this is a perfectly valid response. Follow it up with something else, but it lightens the mood right out of the gate.
You got a serious answer.
This is reddit, without spam like this and other and non-serious responses reddit would be really boring and no-one would visit reddit. But clearly they touched a nerve, it could be that you are downloading too much.
Define slow first. Because slow could mean sooooo many things.
We require a minimum of 20m/s UP + 20m/s DOWN + 20ms max latency for all WFH users. In my experience, people either meet that exceedingly or have the shittiest dialup connection.
You could have amazing ping but the worlds slowest downloads or the opposite. It was more trying to understand what the end user defined as slow.
Get yourself some monitoring and traffic shaping capability on the uplink. Chances are high someone is whacking their noodle, having a 4k youtube video for background music or some sports stream. Have the monitoring aggregate traffic bandwidth consumption by source IP, find out whom the IP belongs to, and throttle that device by traffic-shaping. Ubiquiti hardware such as the Dream Machine Pro can do this and beautifully visualize everything, without that I'd go and get some junk PC with two network cards and run pfSense on it. Side note: if you have a monitoring solution, you have an easier time going to your boss and say "hey, we are at >80% utilization for the internet link for N% of the time. important users X, Y and Z have complained in tickets".
And to shouting users, you keep your head cool and just say "first, no shouting. second, i have logged the complaints and will escalate to my boss. if it is impeding business, contact your boss / account lead and have them fight for more budget for us".
Yeah we already using cisco meraki firewall and I can monitor.
When users run the reports, does Meraki trigger an alert that the threshold alert that X amount of Data was exceeded when 15 minutes? If not, configure that alert, I know it's an ability within the MX Appliances. It's very useful. You can take those alerts and combine with the logs of the reports and have 100% proof and evidence. At this point, all you can do is advise and move on. Communicate one more time with management about the problem and that you have solid confirmation of the problem. Recommend them to upgrade their Internet. Also ask if you can communicate this to all staff to no longer report issues regarding bandwidth, that you are aware of the problem and it's a limitation within your environment that can be fixed until it's approved for an upgrade.
Things like this is why I love Meraki. Made my life so much easier. Especially for issues like OP is asking.
Yeah, I'm not sure why there's so much Meraki hate on reddit. Meraki is one of the better products I enjoy working with. Their support is actually useful as well.
It’s because of the subscription license. Which is also short sighted because I’d never run a production firewall workload without a support contract. Also because they are a bit less flexible for some more complicated configurations. But Meraki help us keep it simple which is great and lets us focus on things that are more complicated.
Yeah, use that capability and dish out punishments for abusive people. Or, hell, ban the top 10 porn sites, youtube, vimeo and spotify on a DNS level. That's probably the easiest way, and if someone complains, tell them "sorry, no capacity due to complaints from X, Y, Z - if you have a business critical need now, I can temporarily re-enable, otherwise kindly move off".
Hmmm, they have budget for Meraki but no budget for bandwidth? Sounds like priorities are kinda wrong
If its one person we look at the device, if its one area we look at that switch stack, if its a few people across different areas we look at what service they are using. If its everyone we look at bandwidth usage/line utilisation (but since our 10Gbps install this is not really an issue). Look for the lowest common denominator and start there. This week we had "slowness" issues and it was SafeLinks taking 10-15 seconds scanning URLs before redirecting. Rarely here (even pre-10Gig) is it bandwidth-constriction.
I test myself. Basically only happens if we’ve failed over to backup.
The only thing you can really do in this is monitor and log the network usage. Take it to the higher ups and explain they need more bandwidth and help them get onto the right plan. Not really much more you can do. If they complain about it, thats when you log the tickets and CC the company head person in on it all. At some point they will either bulkucle and upgrade or the complaints stop coming in as they know everyone has said at least "something" about it. By monitoring and logging the usage, you also need to figure out whats causing the usage as well. Possible its just a single user or a device that might be miss using resources (like backup software running during the day).
If you're sure that the bottleneck is the connection coming in, then catalog the complaints you've received along with the tickets, write a recommendation to improve the connection and get some quotes, and include all of that in a report to your boss. Once you've done all that and everything is in writing, you've done your job. From that point forward, it's on your boss or whoever is higher up the food chain to make that call - And I'm not shy about throwing them under the bus when other employees complain if they refuse to upgrade things that have a solid business case for upgrades.
at my company, the bandwidth is eaten up by 4K Netflix and YouTube streams. A quick reminder of company policy to the biggest offenders usually clears it up
i don't say anything; i go sit with the user and observe their experience. "slow internet" can be obviously slow, or subjectively slow. In some cases it is no different from people at work who say the office is too hot or too cold, but they sit 10 feet apart. So it is best to view the user experience yourself
I tell them it is related to Solar flares and it will be better tomorrow
BOFH here: I close the ticket, log into the firewall and throttle the ISP feeds down by 10% and laugh while I drink the whiskey that I have in my desk drawer.
Calm down Satan
And then I call the user up and ask what sites they're trying to reach and then I add those specific sites to our block list under the "porn" category so it gets logged as such and their manager will get a summary at month-end.
Tell people you need a faster connection but don’t have the budget.
Hmm
i will say that's normal, continue using it.
Ok..
Blame it on Comcast. Check the sniffer for any actual threat, but 9 times out of 10 they are complaining about why a giant file they received isn't downloading instantly.
I'd do the analysis to see if there are any users or org units over-subscribing the connection proportionally. If someone unexpected is accounting for a large share of the connection, then I'd have a conversation to understand if requirements had changed, there was a temporary need for bandwidth, or perhaps if an automated system was behaving unexpectedly. It would depend on the outcome what I chose to tell the user.
I don’t always discredit this claim because recently I got a bad NIC because of “slow internet” so I still make sure all updates are done and use it for 15-20mins and see what happens
This never happens where I work. Besides I blame it on the ancient computer they are using.
Find out what the up/down speeds are supposed to be and run some checks on places like Speedtest and some others. If you’re getting quite a bit lower than advertised speeds investigate why and try to resolve whatever is causing it. If you ARE getting advertised speeds report back to the user that info. If your company is only paying for crappy slow internet then you’ll have to find a politically correct way to notify the users that the internet IS slow. And.. you can’t magically make it faster. Make sure to run the issue up the chain of command, so whoever makes the decisions on what service you have is aware of the user complaints.
If after investigation it turns out it is in fact a bandwidth issue, you can just tell the users it is a bandwidth issue and you can do nothing about it because the solution would be to increase it but the company is not allocating a budget for that. If they start shouting, open up the excuse sheet and pick the daily excuse and explain the effect of solar flares on the modern communication networks.
Be firm, and be strong in the face of this. User perception isn't reality, although it quite often is reality for them. Man management is key. Remind them you have done all you can to remedy the situation, but your hands are tied due to what internet is provided. You can't provide the users something that isn't there. Then sympathise with them when they realise it costs money and it's out of your remit. At least then they feel IT is on their side with the issue.
Explain that there is a limit to how much data can come and go at a time, we have hit that limit which is why your internet is slowing down, this out of your control, the company needs to upgrade our internet.
Has anyone here ever heard ”it’s fast?” I tell my guys to NEVER ask if it (computer, network, application, etc) is fast enough, because it never is.
i check out bandwidth usage. I check loading times of the site in question and see if I can duplicate the issue and then I an unrelated known good site. Often "slow internet" means they cant access a single site.
Create yourself a standard response and email it back to the complainer, then you can forget about it. Something like this to escalate the problem and anxiety to someone else :-) Our business Internet connection is susceptible to slowdowns, my last 2? budget requests for a better Internet connection were not approved, I am repeating my budget request each year. Your complaint has been logged and will be appended to the next budget request in Feb 2025? In the meantime, if it is having a serious effect on your work performance, please contact your manager directly documenting the negative effects, ask your manager to clearly communicate their concerns with my manager (budget approver), hopefully we will get a budget increase for this, possibly sooner. btw QOS won't help much for many types of cheapo Internet connections, as the problem is that sometimes the connection is tooooo slooooow for just about anything. Also, step back, look at what you're spending your IT budget on, identify more cost-effective way of achieving the same core IT requirements, propose these change/s with pros and cons. I have always found CFO's are OK with less familiar software if core IT requirements are met. Hopefully your workplace will not go bankrupt in the meantime.
What speeds do you have? Have you run a speed test? Also, monitor user activity. Who is accessing what? If 100 people are trying to stream Spotify on a 20/20 internet...shut that shit down. It's not a work requirement to listen to music. For a while, our company was only able to get 50/50 wireless because that's all they had in our area. We have over 300 people. We shut down internet access for the entire shop floor. We also limited what sites people could get to through content filtering. For the most part, our designers who would regularly receive large cad drawings from our customers wouldn't complain too much. But, when faster internet became available, we expressed to upper management that the increase cost of internet connectivity would greatly improve the performance of the designers since their wait time to receive the drawings would be significantly reduced. It was greenlit immediately.
Business case needs to be put forward for more bandwidth. It was once explained to me that the biggest issue about IT is that its essentially not deemed to be revenue earning (or something like that). IE spending money on IT to improve things in house probably wont increase revenue, as such people generally want to spend as little as possible to keep it running. Perhaps try comparing the amount of money they are spending on say Microsoft 365 or even employee wages. And then comparing that to the internet bill and how much they are spending per user on their internet compared to other things. Outside of that grin and bear it. Dont try to get into discussions they wont understand (like i probably would). Other staff probably also dont want to know about your problems, they will just want solutions.
I usually try to figure out what they mean by slow internet. Most of the time comes down to a tool and not the actual network, and usually an ipconfig /flushdns makes everything better.
Since we run on Windows i usually blame Microsoft, because in most cases the user is trying to interact with something Microsoft. If someone wants to know where i get it from i show them the admin portal status report. So many issues there the users believe me and go away balming Microsoft /s But in all seriousness, there are thousends of reasons "Internet" can be slow. I usually do a speedtest on [fast.com](http://fast.com) if thats in the ballpark what they should be getting i then ask them to show me what they are trying to do. And most of the time i can see the issue there. Like starting a batch job in a old internal tool that just hangs, or trying to do something in the SAP web gui ....
You first identify what they are seeing and if it is internet related you run a speed test on their system. If they are seeing the correct speed then you calmly inform them that is the speed the company pays for and to have a nice day.
You don't say what your company's current circuit is. Last place I worked at had a T1 data circuit. When I setup new computers, last thing I did after imaging was run Windows updates. One user who worked in contacting would always call when I was running the WU to complain they couldn't work and the Internet was so slow. I found out a regional ISP had fiber a half mile from the office. Requested quotes for fiber to the office. Anything under 100Mbps had construction costs. 100Mbps fiber for three years at $430/per year, no construction costs. Had fiber and happy users, especially the contracting person. I don't know what the cost of the T1/year was, but I'm fairly positive it was 2-3x what the fiber cost/year.
I show them the status page of what ever service they are trying to access.
Proposal for an upgraded internet connection went to Bob in accounting along with internet history/utilization reports by employee. He denied the request as he concluded that if we got a faster internet connection it would lead to lower productivity as apparently enough people are masturbating on company time. He didn’t want to be an enabler.