It’s no longer an option for today’s business; we need the Internet to stay productive, relevant, and competitive in business. Yet not all Internet is created equal, and your speed depends on how your company chooses to use and maintain your technology. Read on to understand bandwidth and the impact it has on the operations and productivity of your business.
Many companies today have fully integrated VoIP phone systems and data communication. They utilize cloud services, use data rich applications to meaningfully and efficiently communicate with customers, and the list goes on. Some companies have jumped on board with unified communications service providers to help optimize their communications, and are provided a 100% tailored experience that not only saves them money but also: integrates all forms of communications, provides extra layers of
- Integrates all forms of communications
- Provides extra layers of security, and
- Delivers a full platform of options and quality measurements for future improvement.
However, all the right applications, excellent systems, and measurement tools available will fail to be effective if your Internet speeds can’t support them.
Understanding Bandwidth
Internet data travels in a frequency band, and bandwidth is the range of frequencies within a band that are used for transmitting data. Increasing data transmissions without increasing bandwidth will slow down your speeds significantly. Think of it this way: Data packets are like vehicles traveling on a highway. Increase the number of cars without widening the roadway, and you’re going to have bottlenecks and slow downs. Increasing your bandwidth will make traveling on the Internet speedway easier and faster by mitigating data traffic.
Are Slow Speeds Affecting Your Business?
There is a host of ways we use the Internet at work, and a slowdown can have serious ramifications on our bottom line. Great communications solutions and fully integrated applications that allow you to conduct business on the cloud or through a VPN connection for your remote workers has revolutionized what it means to be efficient today. But as they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry without supporting bandwidth. Here are some examples of how improper bandwidth can affect productivity at your company.
Moving to the Cloud
Moving your operation and applications to the cloud or using a virtualization desktop has incredible cost saving benefits and helps increase productivity. You need far less hardware on site, you can protect your data better, and you can develop a business continuity plan to keep your operations running smoothly in the event of natural disasters or other events. But you must also bear in mind that moving your operations off of your local area network, which typically moves data at multi-threaded gigabyte speeds, and on to the cloud means all of your data traffic will share the same network backbone. Going from multi threads to a single backbone translates into potential network slowdowns.
Network slowdowns can severely impact the quality of your VoIP phone systems and hurt your business communication. Dropped calls, increasing jitter, and latency may result in losing a deal and give your company a bad reputation. Even if you prioritize your voice traffic over your data traffic, these network slowdowns may mean Web pages load slower or critical data is dropped, timed-out, or frozen when you’re speaking with your customers.
Productivity with Remote Employees
Virtual private networks, known as VPNs provide remote workers secure access to the network and applications. This cost effective access has significant benefits for both employees and the business as it allows for increased productivity at a fraction of the cost of connecting facilities via leased WAN or MPLS technologies. However, VPN connections also run on your network’s Internet connection and are subject to the same slowdowns.
VoIP Telephony and Video Conferencing
Voice and video in real time is one of those most beneficial, yet challenging applications to optimize and requires a fast Internet connection. Unified communications providers who specialize in delivering seamless voice and video applications can take a lot of the headache out of making this technology work, but this type of communication takes a lot of bandwidth to be effective.
Choosing the right unified communications service provider can mean the difference between increasing sales or experiencing disruptions in business. Many unified communications providers will help you develop a plan that includes up-sizing and optimizing your bandwidth. Understanding how much bandwidth is required and what the projected cost benefit analysis will be is important when selecting the right applications and providers. You are going to need more bandwidth to increase your productivity with the available technology, but through well-implemented plans, you can also significantly increase your revenues.
