Bandwidth: Go Big or Go Home

Big bandwidth is no longer a luxury; it’s almost a necessity.

Without it, you can’t run some increasingly common business applications — and productivity really suffers.

In this one-stop slide show, we lay out a handful of reasons why your customer’s business will thrive by going all-in on bandwidth.

**Source material by Russ White**

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

Fiber is making it possible for some providers to offer massive amounts of bandwidth to their business customers. How much you need depends on how you use it. But maybe you should look at it the opposite way: What kind of opportunities can big bandwidth provide for your business?

Video conferencing is becoming a significant play for many solution providers with customers looking for ways to increase productivity and cut costs. Maybe the client wants to offer a live presentation without flying the presenter to the office. Perhaps an executive needs to be in two places at once. And what about telecommuters? If you ever want to see their faces, video conferencing is essential. Lacking bandwidth? That’s going to be a problem.

Once you have people working remotely – whether from home or a remote office, for instance – they’re going to expect speeds that are at least close to what they get in the main office. Not just because they’re accustomed to it, but also because their productivity will suffer without it. And a whole slew of jittery applications, such as the aforementioned video conferencing, will put them in sloooooo-mo.

You’re probably scratching your head, but think about it. Technology that allows for a healthy telecommuting program is not only a great recruiting tool, but also an incentive for a company’s best employees to stick around.

Any business that welcomes customers inside its doors – consider, in particular, a coffee shop, retail store or hotel – has a reason to go big on bandwidth. An excellent Internet experience might just be the tiebreaker between your client and its competitors when it comes to retaining their business.

Despite what you might’ve heard, the cloud doesn’t solve every technology problem. It’s great for many applications, but you still need to get data to the cloud and back again in a timely manner. Think about cloud backups and large file transfers — if you don’t go big on bandwidth, you could be staring at that little green bar taking its sweet time moving across your screen more often than you’d like.

Despite what you might’ve heard, the cloud doesn’t solve every technology problem. It’s great for many applications, but you still need to get data to the cloud and back again in a timely manner. Think about cloud backups and large file transfers — if you don’t go big on bandwidth, you could be staring at that little green bar taking its sweet time moving across your screen more often than you’d like.

Complex quality-of-service (QoS) configurations are a handful for one network, let alone for those partners supporting multiple customers. Consider the trade-off in productivity required to maintain such policies and the cost of increasing the bandwidth on those customer links on which QoS is configured. Increasing bandwidth might help simplify QoS configurations, ultimately saving opex. Low-bandwidth links might seem inexpensive, but many customers won’t see the hidden costs of poor QoS until it’s too late.