How to Beat the Bandwidth Hogs

Are your voice/data communications services getting muscled over by Bandwidth Hogs?

Like a pack of loud motorcycle riders, the Bandwidth Hogs crowd the entire highway on your network. And, worse yet, you often won't notice until the resulting clutter disrupts your business.

In this case, “Hogs” refers to practices, not people. Which is good, because we at Fusion can help you better manage these practices.

Much of the activity stems from the realities of today's dependency on multi-media resources. Remember when we once discouraged employees for downloading videos and using social media on the job? Now, streaming content serves as a valuable tool and social media is revealing more about customers—and allowing companies to connect to them—in previously unimaginable ways.

That said, this kind of technological progress comes with a price.

Internet-generated broadband traffic will increase 50 percent every year on fixed networks and double on mobile ones, according to a forecast from International Data Corp. (IDC). IDC cites Web browsing, peer-to-peer file sharing and audio/video streaming as primary drivers of bandwidth consumption.

You may find that this insatiable demand is impacting your business at the wrong times. Such as when a sales transaction is about to close and the connection gets lost. Or when you're finalizing a client agreement on the phone and the call suddenly gets choppy—or dropped entirely. Or when critical reports sent via email take forever to call up.

None of this occurs instantly. It develops gradually over time. But, eventually, it turns into such a productivity drag that you realize you've dug yourself into a very deep hole and have no idea of how to climb out.

But this is entirely avoidable. At Fusion, we're constantly resolving these issues for customers with the following offerings:

1. Asymmetrical traffic configuration/traffic prioritization. In many cases, it's not really about the amount of traffic generated, but the way you're generating it. Downstream traffic, for example, dominates at a 10-to-1 ratio over upstream, according to the IDC bandwidth research. Streaming causes much of this, since it's one-way (downstream). Voice calls, in contrast, go in two directions. Increasing dependence upon cloud solutions also increases asymmetrical patterns. Our services allow for greater asymmetrical capabilities, separating speeds to maximize flow. We'll also prioritize your voice/data as well through our Quality of Service (QoS) enhancements, to make sure transmissions that are most important get through. During the day, for example, voice calls for sales operations and phone conferences are more essential than data exchanges so we free up voice communications during the day and then allow for more data transmission after regular hours.
2. Network assessments and 24/7/365 monitoring. We're happy to establish round-the-clock oversight of your activity to assess patterns and report that back to you. We'll conduct in-depth assessments. We can help you come up with alternative, corrective strategies if there are developing issues. And we do this no matter what level of pricing package you're buying from us – which few network-services providers are willing to do.
3. More bandwidth. Sometimes, it really is best to just ante up on the bandwidth equation. That's fine. We can get your company humming at the speeds you need—whether it's 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps or more.

Question of the week: How are Bandwidth Hogs disrupting your business operations?