Let’s continue with throughput. Now we’re going to dig a little deeper and get into speed tests. We wrote a few blogs ago what’s so important about latency. How important it is when it comes to network speed. A speed test measures both latency and throughput. Together, they will give you a good idea of how your network is performing.

Why is this so important? When an employee in your office asks why the network is running so slow, or cloud applications aren’t performing as expected, “I don’t know” doesn’t cut it. Having latency and throughput numbers at your fingertips can and will provide the insight you need to figure out the problem.

Let’s go to a real life example:

A potential JitterWorks client related to us an all too familiar story. Her POS system wasn’t working. When she called the software company, they told her it was an Internet problem. When she called her ISP, they told her there was nothing wrong with her connection, she was getting the speeds she should expect based on her service. She hired an IT consultant – at $95 per hour – to find the problem. After 2 hours of diagnostics, a speed test revealed that there was nothing wrong with her Internet connection. Her latency and throughput numbers were acceptable. So $190 later, he confirmed  it was a software problem.

Moral of the story is, obviously had she had that information at her disposal as soon as the POS problem arose, this business owner would have known it was a software issue. She lost business while the POS system was down and it cost her almost two hundred dollars to figure it out! That’s why we can’t stress enough the importance of LOTUs.