As 2023 comes to a close, we thought it would be a good idea to give you a peek into one of the services JitterWorks provides for our MSP partners and clients. Below you will see excerpts of a Network Performance Assessment we recently provided to a MSP we’ve been working with.

The MSP has a client who was nervous about converting their Internet from a dedicated fiber connection to a shared fiber connection. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s discuss the difference between the two.

It’s pretty much what you’d think. If you have a 50 Mbps dedicated fiber connection, you are guaranteed to get 50 Mbps every time. On a shared fiber connection, there is no guarantee that you will achieve 50 Mbps. However, we have discussed in many blogs that for most small businesses and home users, that is not a problem.

It might be a good time to remind our readers that we are talking about bandwidth, not speed. 50 Mbps represents the volume of data that can be transmitted over the Internet connection measured in megabits per second.

While the MSP’s client was still on a 50 Mbps dedicated fiber connection, JitterWorks tracked bandwidth utilization and latency so when the client moved to a 500 Mbps shared fiber connection, we had key metrics we could compare.

Here is part of the assessment sent to the MSP:

“The 500 Mbps shared is looking very good. We ran a speedtest off-hours from the JitterHub and saw just over 600 Mbps up and down.”

“Network latency is better than on the 50 Mbps dedicated which confirms our hunch. Even though they used 20 Mbps of the 50 Mbps pipe, it can be enough to result in a wider variation in network latency (aka jitter). The blue shows 1 out of 20 packets did not make the round trip, but that is to be expected since “ping” packets get lower priority by routers. The shaded area is the variation from the average which is represented by the green. Note the average ping time to the Google DNS server (8.8.8.8) is around 11 ms. The same as the 50 Mbps dedicated fiber.” 

“Bandwidth utilization is about the same as it was on the dedicated fiber. Solid green is average download traffic, hollow green shows download spikes. Blue is upload traffic.”

“So that’s great news, better Internet at a huge savings.”

By assessing the performance of the dedicated fiber connection and comparing it to the performance of the shared fiber, JitterWorks was able to conclude that the client should not see any difference in their Internet service while saving a whopping $530 a month in Internet charges. This was a win for the MSP and their client.

JitterWorks would like to wish all our readers, clients and future clients a very happy, healthy and successful 2024. We are excited to see what comes next.