Internet Bandwidth - Is More Better?

My first computer in high school was really just a glorified teletype machine, but I learned to program it with a series of commands through punched tape. It wasn't until I arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 70s that I got my first real indoctrination into the world of computers. During this time user-friendly PCs were still somewhat of a figment of the imagination so my first statistics class had us writing programs in huge trays of consecutively ordered punch cards. It was in this class that I first saw few fellow students fall into a blubbering mass of misery if their tray was accidentally knocked over or otherwise disrupted which rendered their program un-runnable. Having had that experience, I can truly appreciate the ease of today's modern PCs and the immediate access to information all through a simple click of the mouse.
That being said, how does the Internet actually work? To oversimplify, picture a system of roadways that enable you to get from your home to the destination of your choosing. While you may need to access several local roads, main roads, or even the freeway, you will eventually reach your destination. The same is true for how data travels across the Internet; from your computer, to your local router, to a larger Internet provider (who has access to the backbone of the Internet), to another Internet provider where it jumps to their routers, and then finally to the router at your local destination.
Today our daily business interactions depend on a connection to the Internet, but in the beginning we really only needed access to AOL email, chat rooms and some work applications. We were jazzed when the old 14.4 baud modem was replaced by the twice-as-fast 28.8 baud modem. Remember the old dial-up access where you'd gain access to the Internet through a local phone number? Your PC seized your main phone line (since that was the avenue of transport then) and dialed away. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you'd actually connect on the first try! Often though you'd wait through one or more redial cycles before finally getting a connection. For basic applications the connection speed was tolerable, but for many large data applications it was painfully slow. Then phone companies started providing Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access. To think, you could have your computer and your phone on the same number and use them both simultaneously! DSL granted much faster Internet access than the old dial-up modems, and was an improvement over the rarely adopted ISDN circuits which offered digital access but at a high cost.
However, in the business space, organizations were starting to move toward other dedicated technologies such as the T1 connection. This 24 channel aggregate circuit boasted the ability to have both Internet access (data) and phone line access (voice). You mostly had to dedicate the channels you wanted for each, or just make the whole thing voice or data. Each channel is a 56k throughput path so with 24 channels bonded together an end user had over 1.5 megabits per second of Internet access. This is about six times the access speed of the DSL circuit. In the early 90s, prices for these connections were astronomical so the T1 was limited to companies with deep pockets or those who had no choice but to pay the price. Some larger implementations leveraged several T1 circuits bonded together for even more bandwidth. But big business and webhosts still needed more and moved to T3 or T3 circuits; the latter being equal to 28 T1 lines or 44.736 megabits per second. For our purposes in the SMB space, T1 was largest product used.
It's safe to say that nearly every SMB out there needs to have Internet access. The reasons may all be different and the uses diverse, but the basic premise remains unchanged. The real question you small and mid-sized business decision makers need to ask yourselves is, how much access do I need? Like the reason for having it, the amounts needed are just about as wide ranging. Not only that, but then you need to consider the delivery method. In most cases the delivery method will be over some traditional hard-wired facility from your phone company or a direct ISP. In other cases, you may require some kind of wireless solution like satellite or cellular. Companies with remote locations or those who are saddled with inadequate provider infrastructure may require a wireless option.
After selecting the appropriate type of Internet access it's important to determine the required bandwidth, but this can be a tricky proposition. The reason being is there are factors that will affect the performance of your Internet connection not all of which are business-related. One blog I've read recently has some really good hard numbers to consider when you are looking at what you will need in terms of bandwidth for your organization. In 2012, Peter Bright of ArsTechnica.com wrote a piece, "How much bandwidth does your office really need?" which cited many of the same bandwidth hogs that I have pointed out to my customers and prospects over the last eight years. Interestingly, the landscape has changed a bit and applications have grown and become more sophisticated and memory intensive. Today, I constantly see organizations with employees utilizing huge chunks of the Internet pipe with streaming media and social media sites. There may be reasons to enable some of these applications for certain employees, but by and large most SMB entities should opt for a near zero percent usage for most users.
With the ease of deploying an Internet solution, there is one area often overlooked by many SMBs organizations; they fail to enable even the most basic of encryption techniques. The results of this neglect can be catastrophic, but in most cases the worst that actually happens is that performance is degraded by the interception of the wireless bandwidth by unauthorized parties. I am not advocating the abolition of wireless access at work nor am I saying that everyone is vulnerable to the worst-case scenarios. The fact is you just need to consider that wireless can be another hole in the net of bandwidth for your organization and to make sure it is secure and guarded.
How will you know if your bandwidth is being hammered by non-productive or unapproved applications and usages? For the bulk of the SMB world, the answer is you won't. Well, except for the constant complaints from your staff that the network is slow, or how they cannot access the necessary data or applications from remote locations. There are tools that can help in the fight against bandwidth loss. Some are rather expensive such as Cisco's Packet Shaper 6500, the PacketShaper, Mach5, and CacheFlow devices from Blue Coat Systems. These sophisticated appliances determine which applications are allowed more bandwidth and which should be limited or blocked altogether. The downside to these robust devices is their large price tag. While not as granular in control or all-encompassing as those appliances mentioned above, there are controls embedded in SMB-class firewall appliances that can be of great assistance. Barracuda Networks, Dell SonicWALL and Cisco all have content filtering applications. Content filtering essentially allows the administrators to control both access times and target unwanted destinations. If you want to block personal POP3 email, streaming audio and video, or social media sites you can do that in most cases with software on the firewall. In some situations there is an extra charge for these abilities, but the savings in employee productivity often outweigh the extra expense of the licensing.
One other consideration is the members of your team that telecommute. Those that work from home or other remote locations can also impact your Internet bandwidth at corporate headquarters. As your employees log on to your network over a virtual private network (VPN), they become users of the network at the office when they use an Internet browser or access any Internet-based application. Plan ahead for this degradation based on the number of concurrent users you will have at the busiest of times and based on what they will be doing.
We are always at the mercy of available Internet access, and this is true both in our professional and personal lives. It's more important than ever to consider partnering with a solid third-party provider to help you measure and estimate what your needs will be and how best to protect them. Throwing more bandwidth at a slow network may temporarily alleviate the symptoms but often does not sure the affliction. Take careful consideration in planning and your days of cursing the network gods may be behind you. Well, at least for now!

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For more information regarding SecurElement solutions, interested parties can contact the sales department at 484.323.1629 or via email at sales@securelement.com.