If you aren’t able to calculate your bandwidth requirements accurately, you could end up overpaying for bandwidth you don’t need, or worse, being unable to connect to your customers or to vital online services. While there is no universal answer to the question “How much bandwidth do I need?” there are steps you can take to estimate your requirements.
What Is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the amount of information that your Internet connection can handle every second. The more bandwidth available to your business, the more data you can transfer at once. This data may include:
- Voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) phone calls
- Videos
- Images and text from websites
- Video conferencing
- Data that your business sends and receives from cloud backup services
Bandwidth is measured in megabytes per second (MBps). This is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred through your Internet connection per second. Internet connections typically have different bandwidth limits for downloads and uploads.
Your download bandwidth is the amount of data you can receive each second, and the upload bandwidth is the amount of data you can send. If your business uses video conferencing or a VoIP system, you need high upload and download limits. If you only download data from the Internet without sending much data, then you can get away with just a high download bandwidth.
Bandwidth Requirements
The amount of bandwidth you need depends on the nature of your business. If you run a call center that uses VoIP to connect with customers, your bandwidth needs will be very high; experts recommend 3MBps bandwidth both up and down to handle just one call at a time.
Other activities that require a lot of bandwidth are high definition (HD) streaming and video conferencing. To stream an uncompressed HD video, you’ll need a connection that can handle up to 10MBps. The bandwidth requirements for video conferencing are similar.
Consider the number of people who work in your organization. Typically, business bandwidth demands grow linearly with the size of the business. If one user requires 3MBps to work effectively, 10 users will need 10 times as much.
Remember that the amounts given here are only estimates of your bandwidth needs. If you’re still unsure, TC Tech Systems can help you find the perfect solution for your company.
