New research from network management firm NetEvidence, which studied 6,000 UK companies owning leased line broadband Internet connections, has revealed that 1 in 6 suffer performance loss due to insufficient bandwidth. The growing prevalence of bandwidth hungry business applications, such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), is partly to blame.

The VNUNet summary notes that most I.T. managers tolerate the situation because the majority of Internet services (website browsers etc.) are designed to work with older connections, thus performance drops slowly and related departments can avoid upgrading until complaints escalate. The issue is far more problematic for smaller hosting providers, where poor performance can discourage both existing and new customers.