Bandwidth Balloon

Organizations have been on a bandwidth binge, increasing the size of their “pipes” or Internet connections as bandwidth prices drop and they seek to boost their competitiveness. That pumped up bandwidth—the amount of data that can be transferred on line in a fixed amount of time—has become critical to efficiently transferring file types that have grown exponentially in size, to accommodate employees accessing the Web via mobile devices, or to enable voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service that saves on calling costs but gobbles pipe space.

The increasing number of employees working from home also has made shrewd allocation of bandwidth more critical to business success. “More businesses are putting their accounting or customer relationship management software on the Web rather than on servers in the office because it’s easier for remote employees to share and move documents around,” says Marc Agar, president and CEO of CA Communications, a telecommunications company in Minnetonka. “To access those applications, employees working remotely need the right bandwidth or it becomes difficult for them to do their jobs efficiently or productively.”

David Lover, chief technology officer with Cross Telecom, a telecommunications technology company in Bloomington, says burgeoning file sizes and growing use of online video sharing also have fueled the need for enhanced bandwidth. “PowerPoint files used to be measured in kilobytes and now they are measured in megabytes,” he says.

“To send multimedia files from one place to another is just a bigger challenge today.”

In addition, Agar notes, employees increasingly expect high-speed connections from their mobile communication devices. “People using EVDO [evolution data only] cards on laptops can now get DSL-like speeds,” he says.

Disaster recovery and business continuity efforts represent another, albeit frequently overlooked consumer of an organization’s bandwidth, says Brad Wampole, lead technical consultant for N’compass, a technology consulting firm in Minneapolis. “That includes replication of data across lines to make sure, in the event of hardware failure or outage, that business will be seamless and quickly back up and running,” he says.

“The reality is if you don’t have a certain level of high-speed bandwidth today, you have a tough time staying in business,” Agar says.

But bandwidth often is expanded for the wrong reasons, some experts say. “People often reach for more bandwidth than they need out of fear because they think more capacity naturally equates to a more productive and efficient business,” says Anne Garlock, product marketing manager for Eschelon Telecom, Inc., a telecommunications company in Minneapolis. “But more isn’t necessarily better.”