No matter the shape or size of your business, your ability to deliver for your customers depends on functioning and efficient IT infrastructure. Lagging bandwidth will slow down connectivity and communications in your business, leading to greater downtime and more unsatisfied customers.
This is why your business IT strategy should include bandwidth optimization as an absolute priority. With enough bandwidth, there is no limit on what you can do. Here’s how your connected office can quickly get more bandwidth, starting now.
Identify the problem
As with any IT troubleshooting, being able to identify the exact nature of the problem is vital. For this, you will need a business-ready network bandwidth monitor that can tell you who is using most of your bandwidth in real-time, and what you can do to instantly free up some capacity. This is an impactful and immediate solution that can help you to stop high levels of traffic caused by inappropriate network use, and to convert that into business-related traffic for the benefit of the company.
Prioritize by traffic type
In any business, not all traffic is created equal. This is where Quality of Service (QoS) protocols come in, which allow you to prioritize important traffic to make sure that it gets first dibs on bandwidth. For example, you could set video conferencing as a higher priority than web browsing.
Get wired
A simple yet elegant solution to your bandwidth problems is to switch to ethernet cables for the whole office. Although wireless connectivity is the norm, it is still not as efficient or as secure as a classic wired network connection. Ethernet cables have the added benefit of being impervious to interference from external devices, meaning more bandwidth for your buck.
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Start booting people and devices off
If things start to get desperate, it’s time to get ruthless. Not all workers in your office will require network connectivity for their duties. For these, it is worth drawing up a plan to boot them off the network temporarily in times of bandwidth shortages. You can also use a monitoring tool to identify high-bandwidth users and ask them to cut back.
Schedule bandwidth usage by activities
Just as you can prioritize by different types of traffic, you can also schedule low-priority business activities to take place during out-of-office hours, to save on that precious bandwidth. For example, your accounting and data backup activities do not need to be absorbing bandwidth during critical business hours, or during an important video conference. These sorts of low-level business activities can easily be scheduled to take place during times where there is spare bandwidth.
Always protect customer details
You should be doing this anyway, but it is especially urgent if you find yourself with a sudden and unexplained drop in available bandwidth. If you experience a big bandwidth drop, your first priority should be to diagnose the source of the drop and to protect the confidential customer details from any potential external interference.
By following these simple steps, you can instantly free up significant bandwidth for your entire office, allowing for more efficient business activities.