Why the Bandwidth Shortage is Only Going to Get Worse

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. SCW 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 SCW:

• 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 SCW at (509) 534-1530.