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Most business owners have experienced it. It’s 5:30pm, a customer is on the phone, your booking page is spinning, your payment terminal freezes, and your team is trying (again) to send a file that won’t sync.
It’s tempting to dismiss these issues as minor or just part of doing business. But a few seconds here and there quickly add up to hours, lost sales, frustrated staff, and lost momentum.
Atlassian, referencing research from Gartner, Avaya and the Ponemon Institute, notes that the average cost of IT downtime for large organisations rose to nearly US$9,000 per minute by 2016. While small businesses face lower losses, downtime can still cost between roughly US$137 and US$427 per minute, depending on industry and business size.
In this article, we’ll unpack the real cost of unreliable internet and how smart upgrades can stop the financial bleed.
What unreliable internet looks like in real businesses
You don’t need a full outage to lose time or money. Most of the damage comes from subtle issues like slowness, congestion, or minor dropouts that interrupt daily tasks.
This leads to wasted time, repeated actions, and poor customer experiences.
The labour costs of unreliable internet
Research from Oxford Economics found just under half of surveyed employees said they lose more than 10% of their workday, around 48 minutes, waiting for software and systems to load.
Multiply this by five days a week and a five-person team, and you're looking at over 20 hours lost per week. That’s half a week’s wages in waiting time alone.
Remote and hybrid staff are hit harder.
A UK survey of remote workers found unreliable home internet connections created material delays, especially during high demand hours. Lost focus, interrupted meetings, and rework became daily friction points.
And it only takes a micro-delay to break concentration. Usability studies show that just one second of delay is enough to break a person’s flow of thought. Frequent delays not only slow people down, they make tasks feel harder and more exhausting.
Revenue leakage in online retail
In online retail, even small lags hurt. Akamai reports that a 100-millisecond delay can reduce conversion rates by up to 7%. The BBC found they lost 10% of users for every extra second of page load time.
Slow websites and poor checkout experiences quietly bleed revenue, and most teams don’t realise how much.
Unreliable internet doesn’t just slow internal operations. It affects every touchpoint where you meet customers:
- Booking forms time out
- Payments fail
- Chat tools disconnect
- Calls drop
- Customers move on
Even when your team is doing their best, tech issues can make you look unreliable. A slow or glitchy experience erodes trust. Customers may not complain, but they’re less likely to return.
Why it gets worse during peak times
Evening and weekend slowdowns are common. More people online means more congestion. Unfortunately, that’s also when demand peaks for many retail, hospitality, and service businesses.
This 'peak time penalty' hurts most when the stakes are highest.
Here are some common reasons why peak time performance drops.
- Network congestion: Residential and entry-level plans share bandwidth with many nearby users. As demand rises, speeds fall.
- Contention ratios: Lower-grade plans allow more users per available capacity, increasing slowdowns during busy periods.
- Limited upstream speed: Video calls, cloud apps, POS systems and file uploads all rely on upload speed, which is often the first to suffer.
- Routing and prioritisation: Business traffic may not be prioritised on consumer plans, leading to latency and packet loss.
- Wi-Fi saturation: More devices connected at once can overload routers, especially older hardware.
Practical fixes that reduce cost quickly
Upgrades don’t have to be expensive or disruptive. In many cases, small, targeted changes can immediately improve performance, reduce downtime, and remove hidden productivity costs.
Switch to a higher-capacity plan
Moving to a plan with more bandwidth and better peak-time performance reduces congestion across the entire team. This is often the fastest way to stabilise cloud apps, video calls and POS systems during busy periods. Try a faster fibre internet plan, like the nbn 1,000 offered by Swoop.
Use a business-grade router
Consumer routers struggle with multiple users and devices. A business-grade router handles higher traffic loads, manages connections more efficiently, and gives you access to quality-of-service controls that keep critical tools running smoothly.
Add wired connections for key desks
Hard-wiring reception, POS, admin or finance desks removes Wi-Fi instability. Ethernet connections are faster, more reliable and less affected by interference, especially in busy or multi-storey spaces.
Add automatic failover to mobile data
A 4G or 5G backup connection can keep essential systems online if the main service drops. Even short outages can be costly, and failover ensures phones, bookings and payments continue without interruption.
Create a separate guest Wi-Fi
Guest traffic can quietly consume bandwidth. Separating staff and customer Wi-Fi protects performance for business-critical systems and reduces security risks.
Prioritise voice and video traffic
Voice calls and video meetings are sensitive to delays. Traffic prioritisation ensures these tools stay clear and stable, even when downloads or updates are running in the background.
Schedule heavy uploads and backups overnight
Large file uploads, cloud syncs and backups can slow everything else down. Running them outside business hours frees up bandwidth when staff and customers need it most.
Enable offline modes
Many cloud tools allow offline access and local syncing. This reduces reliance on constant connectivity and keeps staff productive during brief slowdowns or outages.
Use local caching
Caching frequently used data locally cuts repeat downloads and speeds up access to commonly used systems, files and websites.
Optimise websites for speed and efficiency
Faster websites use less bandwidth and respond more quickly for both staff and customers. Compressing images, reducing scripts and using efficient hosting improves performance across the board.
It feels obvious that you should be looking for a better internet connection right away.
It’s time to stop thinking of internet as a basic utility and start seeing it as business-critical infrastructure. Just like power, a small outage or delay can ripple through every part of your operations. Now might be the time to upgrade to a better internet plan.
Key takeaways
- Industry research shows IT downtime can cost up to US$9,000 per minute for large organisations and hundreds per minute for small businesses, making unreliable internet a hidden but ongoing drain on revenue and productivity.
- Peak times exacerbate internet issues, highlighting the need for business-grade plans to ensure performance.
- Companies should actively evaluate their internet costs versus productivity losses to justify improvements.
Author: Marshall Thurlow is Director and Founder of Orion Marketing Pty Ltd. He is a digital marketer with expertise in SEO, website design, content marketing, and project management.
