We’ve spent a few blogs putting down the importance of bandwidth when we spoke about latency and when we introduced the importance of tracking and trending throughput. In fact, we went as far as to say that both were more important than the bandwidth “speed” your Internet Service Provider promises they will deliver.

We put speed in quotes because, if you’ve read our previous blogs, you now know that speed, when it comes to bandwidth, is a little misleading. Or maybe a lot misleading. Bandwidth is measured in Megabits per Second. So really it has more to do with how much data can be transmitted, not how fast. That’s latency’s job.

So why do service providers boast long and loud about bandwidth? Simple. If your company uploads and downloads a ton of data during the work day, you want it all to flow freely at the same time. (Remember our old race car analogy in the July 29 blog How Jitter Works?) That’s where the “more bandwidth” mantra comes in.

Yes, having the right amount of bandwidth is very important when you are running a company dependent on a fast Internet. You can have an Internet connection with very low latency (that’s good) and very high throughput (also good). But the amount of bandwidth your service provider allocates will determine how much data will flow through your connection at any given time.

“How do I know how much bandwidth my company needs?” That’s the million dollar question. Internet Service Providers are quick to tell you how important it is to have the right amount of bandwidth. But they lack any unified procedure for calculating exactly what is that amount. Some will tell you that whatever number you come up with, it’s a good idea to double it. That just doesn’t sound like a good business approach to us.

In any company, it would be difficult to estimate the amount of bandwidth you will need. Any number you come up with will likely be nothing more than an educated guess. The only true way to calculate the amount of bandwidth you need is to track and trend your company’s utilization over a period of time.

You’re probably wondering how the heck to do that. Well there are surefire ways to track and trend bandwidth utilization and take the guesswork out of it. Next week we’ll go into detail on how your company can stay productive by knowing, not guessing, how much bandwidth you really need.

We hope that we haven’t hurt bandwidth’s feelings, but it’s just not the superstar “speed” requirement that most ISP’s would lead you to believe. True network speed – much like the long running television show Friends – requires an ensemble cast to be successful.