Suffolk Computer Consultants, Inc. Blog

Bandwidth is something that a lot of people have a baseline level of understanding of, but not much else. Today, we wanted to address some of the most frequently asked questions that business owners have about their bandwidth, specifically network bandwidth, and what it means for running your company and business technology most effectively.

In today’s day and age, it is effectively unheard of for a business not to rely on the Internet in some shape or form. This means that maintaining a well-functioning network is of increased importance for businesses of all sizes, which in turn will require you to make a few critical determinations. Here, we’ll examine some of the factors that may indicate your networking equipment is due for a refresh.

With the 2018 repeal of net neutrality laws, many Internet users were concerned about the financial ramifications of those companies who profit off of the delivery of the Internet being put in control. The assumption was that speeds would plummet while costs grew. Now, about a year later, have these predictions turned out to be reality?

After the net neutrality laws were repealed in 2018, many people were afraid of what that would mean for their wallets. As huge telecommunications corporations gained control over the Internet, many Americans were left supposing that they were going to be facing higher bills and slower speeds. How has this materialized in the 11 months since net neutrality was repealed?

A Poem about Internet Bandwidth
There’s a hunger still unsatisfied that reaches far across the land,
Caused by devices in every hand.
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition,
Who can feed this Netflix addiction?
Or, to put it plainly;
Keeping up with increasing bandwidth demands is straining.

Will there ever be enough?
To give you a sense of the looming bandwidth problems that are just over the horizon, consider these statistics and trends:

• A single hour of HD video takes up about 3GB of data.
• According to a 2015 Sandvine report:
  
  • Netflix accounts for 37 percent of all North American downstream Internet traffic.
  • YouTube is in second place at 16 percent.
• According to Cisco, 50 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
• According to a 2016 Spiceworks survey, 62 percent of companies use network-enabled security cameras. These HD cameras are infamous for producingdata-intensive video streams.
• According to Sandvine, cloud-based file sharing services and online storage account for 40 percent of upstream North American traffic.
• All things considered, media streaming, mobile devices, and cloud computing shouldn’t be viewed as merely fads. In fact, every IT professional is well aware that online media will eat up more bandwidth. As a result, businesses of all types are relying more on cloud-based services.

While this may not be much of a concern for the average consumer wishing to stream Netflix at home, these trends pose challenges to company networks supporting dozens or hundreds of users and devices. If users in your workplace are left unchecked, your network may slow to a crawl in the middle of the workday when you need it the most. We don’t have to tell you how bandwidth and bottleneck issues of this magnitude can wreak havoc on productivity, causing major and expensive downtime.

How to Ensure There’s Enough Bandwidth for Everyone in Your Office
Aside from obvious solutions, like implementing bandwidth monitoring tools and upgrading your company’s Internet package and internal switches so they can handle the increased traffic, you can curtail this problem by implementing some hard and fast policies regarding Internet usage in the workplace.

Taking proactive measures like these should especially be applied in relation to how employees use their mobile devices (a trend known as BYOD). For help blocking problem websites and apps from hogging up too much bandwidth on your network, one key tool designed to assist with this is a content filtering solution. Suffolk Computer Consultants can provide you with such a tool.

For your consideration, here are some additional tips on how you can optimize your company’s bandwidth, brought to you by Suffolk Computer Consultants:

• Establish Quality of Service (QoS) policies for the services that are most important. By prioritizing business-critical applications like your VoIP phone system, line of business applications, and other everyday, always-on services, you can make sure they don’t get interrupted by an employee downloading large files or streaming hit shows like Westworld on their lunch break.
• Set up an alternate network to allow for visitors and other users to access the web and social media to segregate the traffic from your business’ network. This is especially important for businesses that offer guest Wi-Fi. Just make sure that the users ask for the security code. Otherwise, you’ll never know what’s lurking on your free Wi-Fi network.
• If your network bandwidth is being utilized excessively by particular sources, then putting data usage caps on users, services, or their devices can help you even out the distribution of your network resources.

For help managing your company’s network so that bandwidth is never in short supply, reach out to Suffolk Computer Consultants at 631-905-9617.

Cloud-based productivity apps like Office 365 allow businesses unparalleled mobility and collaboration; that is, if a company’s Internet connection is up for the task. Unfortunately, too many organizations aren’t able to fully utilize their cloud solutions due to poor connectivity, bandwidth, and latency issues, according to a new report from Zscaler.

Believe it or not, the Internet we rely on so much is only accessible by half of the world today. It can be hard to grasp, considering the effectively-constant access that we have, but more than three and a half billion people in the world lack the means to access any of it. However, Google started to change that years ago, when it created an R&D facility known as Google X.

A slow Internet connection should be the least of our worries, but somehow, this most minor of inconveniences can be one of the most frustrating experiences in modern computing. Fortunately, there are a few ways to potentially improve your connection. At the very least, they might help to explain why your connection suffers.