What Is Bandwidth and How Can It Affect Your Business

 

A slow internet connection may cost your business tons of time and money. If you are reading this blog, you are likely dealing with slow internet speed. According to a survey, poor internet connection is the top reason for employees’ frustration in businesses. The problem might be with your office network’s bandwidth.

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is often mistaken for internet speed however it is not the case. Bandwidth is the volume of information that can be transferred through a connection for a certain amount of time. It is been calculated in megabits per second (Mbps).  Although the bandwidth can affect the internet speed, they are not interchangeable.

To understand better, let’s take an example. Consider your connection’s bandwidth as a highway and your data as cars traveling through it. The wider the highway is, the faster the cars can travel from one point to another on this highway. So if you have low bandwidth, it means the highway has less number of lanes to allow the cars to travel at the fastest speed and cause congestion.

Apart from that, generally, your actual bandwidth can be less than your maximum bandwidth. This means you might be overloading your network. The reason behind less bandwidth can be network congestion, network overhead, and other external factors.

In simple words, making sure that your bandwidth matches the amount of data traffic can ensure the highest possible speed of your network.

How to measure bandwidth

Bandwidth is conventionally measured in bits per second (bps), but modern links have a greater capacity which is why it is now often measured in megabits per second (Mbps) or gigabits per second (Gbps). To measure a bandwidth of a network, the total amount of traffic sent and received during a specific period is measured. Another method of measuring bandwidth is transferring a file or a number of files of known count and size and then measuring how long it takes to transfer. The result is converted into Mbps or Gbps by dividing the size of the file by the time of transfer.

Bandwidth and your business

The required bandwidth for your business depends on several factors, such as the number of your employees, the type of software you use, etc. For example, a company that processes a lot of information or edits high-definition videos will need more bandwidth than a company that works with smaller data filers. 

The number of devices owned by your company also affects the bandwidth you choose.  A business with 25 devices might need what it gets from 75 Mbps bandwidth. On the other hand, a business with 200 devices will need bandwidth close to 3000 Mbps.

Choosing the right enterprise internet solutions provider is crucial to ensure the highest productivity of your team. It allows you to meet your clients’ needs on time. with reliable internet solutions, you can make each task more effective and hence your business process will work faster. If you are inquisitive to learn more, feel free to connect with the experts.

Everything You Need to Know about Fixed Wireless Broadband

Planning to opt for fixed wireless broadband for your company to get high-speed internet access without the use of a phone or cable? If your answer is YES, then you are on the right page. Here, you will get all the information that you need for getting fixed wireless broadband service.

What is fixed wireless broadband?

It is a technology, based on radiowaves that allow the users to send and receive high-speed data between two fixed sites or locations. It is neither a mobile technology nor Wi-Fi where the bandwidth is shared on a “one to many” basis. It is an operation of wireless devices in fixed locations. Unlike the mobile device that tends to have battery power; fixed wireless devices usually get their electrical power from utility mains.

How fixed wireless broadband works

Fixed wireless internet transmits data from towers to receivers that the service provider has installed on the property of the user. In order to work, the fixed wireless internet broadband receiver needs to be within around 10 miles from the service provider’s tower.

It needs broadband modems that evade the telephone system and offer internet access much faster than the twisted pair hard-wired telephone or cell phone connection modems.

Benefits of Fixed Wireless Broadband

·         Subscribers of the service can be added or removed to a certain level without any modification in network infrastructure.

·         It provides internet access to remote areas without cables or optical fibers.

·         Bandwidth is considerably much larger because there are no wires or cables to introduce the reactance into the connection as the reactance limits the bandwidth by preventing signals higher than a certain frequency.

·         When the number of subscribers increases, the cost per subscriber decreases.

Reliability of the fixed wireless broadband

Network providers’ congestion & capacity and the installation quality control are the two main factors to determine the reliability and performance of fixed wireless broadband. If the service provider overloads the network, the internet connection speed declines. That’s why it is important to ask the service providers about the network capacity and what are their measures to ensure speed consistency all the time.

Speed if offers

An efficiently installed fixed wireless broadband offers extremely high-speed internet up to 1 Gbps. However, the fixed wireless broadband service provider usually offers speed based on the user’s plan.

Effects of weather on the fixed wireless

Fixed wireless is rarely affected by the weather, except the cases of heavy storms. The modern fixed wireless service providers use a frequency that is seldom affected by the weather.

Other than this, many fixed wireless services are backed by hundreds of kilometers of high-capacity fiber with self-healing rings to ensure uninterrupted service.

To sum up

A vendor owns the fixed wireless technology infrastructure and is responsible for operating and maintaining the network. The vendor also limits the number of users that can connect to the network. The goal of the internet service provider is to deliver reliable fixed wireless internet with a low contention ratio. This maintains the high network capacity by limiting the number of subscribers to every tower.

Some Important Questions To Ask Before Choosing Your Internet Provider

In this day and age, having an internet connection is a necessity, not just for commercial spaces but for residential use as well. Since there has been a significant spike in the need for internet packages over the past decade or so, the number of internet service providers has increased tenfold. Most of you might think that it just makes your task of finding the right internet provider easier and quicker. Well, that’s where you are wrong.

The truth is that choosing the right internet provider can be quite a daunting task, especially because there are a lot of options out there. And it can get even more daunting if you don’t know the right questions to ask them before making a final decision. After all, you would want to get all the information you can before you choose the internet service provider for your house. So, in order to make your task easier, we have compiled a list of questions you must ask in order to be a smart consumer when it comes to choosing the right residential internet packages.

·         What are the speed options?
One of your first questions should be regarding the speed of internet the internet provider can provide. Now, there are several factors that dictate what the right internet speed would be for you such as the amount of streaming you usually do, the number of devices that would be using the internet, and your download requirements. The reliable internet providers offer several speed options in different residential internet packages to their customers and even recommend the one that suits their requirements the best.

·         Would there be data limits?
For those of you who don’t know, data limits are restrictions that internet providers tend to place on their customer’s internet usage. However, not every other internet provider has data limits, but there are some that have soft or hard data limits. A hard data limit refers to the kind of limit that after you use a certain amount of data, you would be either charged overage or will be totally cut off. When it comes to soft data limits, it is when after you use a certain data amount, you would still be able to use the internet but at a slower speed. So, make sure to learn about this in detail.

·         What additional fees should you expect?
Apart from the monthly fee, make sure to ask about any additional fees that you could have to pay and the ways in which you can avoid them. Some of the possibilities might be the installation fees, overage fees if you go beyond your data limit, and so on. So, this is an important question to ask before making the final decision.

 These were some of the important questions that you should not forget or hesitate to ask before making your final decision. You should go with the internet provider that gives you satisfactory answers to all your questions if you want satisfactory internet service in your house.