How Much Bandwidth Does My Business Need?

Business bandwidth needsHaving the appropriate amount of bandwidth for your business’s needs is essential to creating a robust network. 

Inadequate bandwidth can impede productivity and cause problems with web-based applications. 

On the other hand, if you are paying for too much bandwidth, you are spending money that you could use better elsewhere. 

The KR Group has helped dozens of businesses find the right amount of bandwidth for their needs. This ensures all users can access the internet as their job requires, but the company as a whole spends only what’s necessary on internet circuits. 

Your organization is unique, and so are your internet needs. But regardless of what your business looks like, here are a few guidelines to estimating how much bandwidth you should contract for: 

  1. The number of users you have
  2. How your users consume the internet
  3. Anticipated growth

By looking at these three factors, you’ll understand how exactly the internet is being consumed throughout your network and match your contract to your needs

How Many Users Do You Have?

Business bandwidth needsThis number is the most important factor in determining how much total bandwidth you need. 

For some businesses, this is as simple as checking with human resources for a current employee count. 

In other cases, you’ll need to see how many users log onto the internet during a shift or account for part-time and seasonal staff. 

Once you determine your maximum user count accessing the internet at any point in time, you’ll use this number to multiply by how much bandwidth you need. 

This number will vary from household bandwidth recommendations because your company’s internet connection is used differently.

For example, your users shouldn’t be streaming Netflix or even scrolling through Facebook videos on your company network. 

How exactly your users are utilizing the internet varies from company to company and even from department to department. 

How Do Your Users Utilize the Internet? 

Since individual users rely on the internet for individual tasks, you’ll want to audit how each different category of employees utilizes their connection.

Questions you may want to ask your users include: Business bandwidth needs

  • What applications do you use that rely on the internet? 
  • How many of these applications do you have open at once?
  • How heavily do you use these applications? (For example, are they sending a few emails an hour or dozens?) 
  • What devices do you have connected to the company network? 
  • Do you use audio and video for business calls?
  • Do you stream music while you work? 

Some of these activities, such as email and web browsing, don’t require much bandwidth. But, making audio calls over an IP phone system, video conferences, file sharing, and backup services require more bandwidth. 

Check out the graphic above for more information on the required bandwidth for various internet activities.  

Accounting for Growth

Business bandwidth needsOnce you’ve determined how many users access the internet simultaneously and each one’s typical bandwidth usage, you might be tempted to stop here. 

However, you don’t want to forget to think ahead.

Most internet circuit contracts have 3-year terms, so it’s crucial to estimate your bandwidth usage accurately. 

A few questions you may want to ask yourself or the executive team regarding growth include: 

  • Do we have any plans for increasing our staff? 
  • Are there any upcoming projects that will require additional bandwidth? 
  • Are we adding any infrastructure that would require more bandwidth than we’re currently using? 

Regardless of the answers, you’ll want to ensure you have some buffer with your bandwidth to give yourself some wiggle room. 

Analyzing Your Bandwidth Needs

Once you ask yourself the above questions, you’ll have a general idea of how many users you need to account for, how much bandwidth they use on average, and if you need to plan for any additional bandwidth. Ultimately, you should have a rough idea of your business’s bandwidth needs.

However, there is still an element of guessing with this method. One way to have a more detailed account of how much bandwidth you need is to conduct a layer 7 analysis. 

This will assess your business’s internet traffic and determine how much bandwidth you use by tracking the amount of traffic that goes through your network’s firewall.

Another valuable feature of this process is determining if you already have an adequate internet circuit and any slowness is related to another issue such as an incompatible firewall or misconfiguration. 

To get started with your layer 7 analysis, fill out this brief questionnaire to give us an idea of your IT environment. 

You can also read about what a layer 7 analysis does and why it’s beneficial in our article, “Using a Layer 7 Analysis to Assess Internet Traffic.”

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