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Making the most of your bandwidth

By prioritising the bandwidth properly, you can ensure that as demand increases, so critical business demands are met first, says Quentin Daffarn, MD of UC-Wireless.


Johannesburg, 25 Oct 2018
Quentin Daffarn, MD of UC-Wireless
Quentin Daffarn, MD of UC-Wireless

While the cost of bandwidth has dropped dramatically over the past few years, it still remains comparatively expensive in South Africa and the rest of the continent. This is a clear challenge, but it also creates an opportunity to consider ways to manage the use of existing bandwidth.

The trouble with the relatively high cost of bandwidth today, explains Quentin Daffarn, MD of UC-Wireless, is that it leads to organisations generally purchasing less bandwidth than would be ideal for their business to truly prosper. What is needed, then, is a solution that will enable them to optimise their limited low bandwidth availability, rather than purchasing more at additional expense to the business or being able to ensure they don't overspend or under-provide.

"Currently, the chosen way of managing this bandwidth challenge is to block access to certain applications and Web sites. A better way of doing things, however, is to optimise it by ensuring that priority is given to the most important bandwidth requirements, in much the same way as you would prioritise spending needs when drawing up a financial budget," he says.

"So, for example, you may want to determine which applications, solutions and Web sites are critical to your business; in the education sector, for example, this might mean cloud-based learning sites, whereas in the corporate world, it may be a solution like Skype for Business. But, ultimately, it could be anything from cloud-based deployments to specific Web sites or customer relationship management (CRM) tools or even certain YouTube channels."

The idea, he says, is to outline exactly which things are most critical for employees to be able to access, and give priority to these, remembering that with limited bandwidth, there will always be a level of contention, but you don't really want a crucial Skype call with delayed data packets and becoming unintelligible because certain employees are, for example, downloading updates for less critical applications.

"At the same time, however, you have to think about the impact on staff morale of undertaking an across-the-board blocking of certain actions. By prioritising the bandwidth properly, you can ensure that as demand increases, so critical business demands are met first, with any excess bandwidth allocated to other functions. In essence, it means you are not saying to employees that they cannot use bandwidth for non-critical functions; merely that they will have to wait their turn.

"With the right tool, you will also have a dashboard that enables you to view exactly who in your organisation is doing what with the bandwidth. This will give a clearer understanding of how it is being used and allow you to set new policies around prioritisation. Basically, it means you can see, for example, that 20% of your monthly bandwidth is eaten up by social media use, and you can then decide if this is an acceptable cost and, if not, how you would like to go about reducing or eliminating this cost."

It is even possible, adds Daffarn, to control the hours it gets prioritised. So you could easily allow social media usage to receive higher priority after hours, when there is little other traffic, but during working hours you can throttle it.

"Such a tool is particularly suited to enterprises with multiple satellite offices, and is ideal for retail environments that offer public WiFi. With the latter, it will ensure that teenagers who immediately utilise the free access to update their applications are able to do so, but without interfering with the businessman who is making a Skype call from the mall coffee shop.

"Perhaps the best way to explain how the prioritisation works is to view it like checking in for a flight. There are different classes of travel on an aircraft, economy, business and first class, and passengers immediately get put into a priority queue according to their tickets. Ultimately, everybody gets on the plane, but it is all about the order in which you board. When it comes to bandwidth, your critical business functions would be 'first class', while less important tools like social media might be considered 'business class', and 'economy' would be for the applications and Web sites that are more for personal use or of a non-critical, non-time sensitive nature," concludes Daffarn.

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