How much bandwidth do I need?

There is a need to estimate your bandwidth requirements correctly

One of the important factors in running a successful business is in understanding the imperative role of technology today. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, it is highly important to estimate your bandwidth needs as much as the hardware, software and any other technical support that you estimate for. The rate at which data flows through the network is the backbone of your business process applications – an optimum speed range will boost them as well as your business. The bandwidth factor is often under estimated or overbought resulting in additional costs to your business one way or the other.

So how do I know my bandwidth needs?

An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is in all probability going to sell you a bandwidth exceeding your needs. Similar to all walks in life, you will benefit if you can spend some time and effort on estimating your usage. How do you estimate the bandwidth you need? Here is a list of activities consuming Internet bandwidth for a business network that will assist in the calculation. Find out the average consumption per activity and multiply it with the number of users.

Video and audio streaming – These include YouTube and iTunes and are a major drain on business bandwidth. Your business policies might restrict employee’s streaming data usage, especially in HD as it needs at least a speed of 8 Mbps.

VOIP – Provide for bandwidth if you are running your telephony services over the Internet typically in the range of 1 Mbps.

Online file storage like Google Drive, Sharepoint and Dropbox – Employee’s using online file sharing services consume a lot of bandwidth for uploading and downloading files and this just increases with the average size of the files transferred. However, these are becoming critical for the business by every passing day.

Video conferencing between remote locations and people – Video conferencing links between different business locations as well as with people on the move – including marketing, sales, support as well as regular business operations. You may also be supporting use of Skype, Google Hangouts or third party tools.

Remote employee’s connectivity through VPN – A certain percentage of business employee’s are working remotely and you might be tunneling them through VPN’s.

Cloud based services – Does your business interact with cloud based services? You may have saved on the software and hardware, but need to provide for the necessary bandwidth to interact with these for your daily operations.

Email and web-browsing – Though the lowest in terms of consumption they still need  to be accounted and these have also increased over the years with the use of multimedia attachments.

Auto updates – Good way to reduce your bandwidth requirements for software automatic updates is to download them to a single server and distribute them to all supporting machines on your network.

ISP’s tend to provide different downstream and upstream speeds, sometimes even in the ratio of 10:1 as downstream bandwidth is used much more than upstream.           Here is a table to summarize downstream and upstream requirements:

Estimate the average consumption per activity and multiply it with the maximum number of users for your network to give you a good idea of the bandwidth that you should be aiming for. If your estimation comes to 1 Mbps per user for 100 users, then your bandwidth need is about 100 Mbps.

Managing bandwidth needs with time

You may use third party tools like www.speedtest.net and others to test your download and upload speeds that will also help in tracking your changing bandwidth needs. Studies show that business Internet bandwidth usage is increasing at the rate of 50% each year and you will want a contractual agreement with the ISP that can account for it. Bonded Internet is also a great option for scaling your needs with time.