Internet connectivity – how much is enough?

Making sure that your business has sufficient bandwidth to access internet services, key for your business on a day to day basis, is now critical from an operational perspective. The adoption of cloud based technologies has changed the way every business uses the internet; there is still a requirement for fast and reliable download capabilities but much more focus is being placed on the two-way communication of data, with upload speeds becoming more and more important.

Adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings is driving the need for a company to have sufficient connectivity capacity to upload data; these services are seen as a must, for smaller organisations especially, who view the increasing flexibility and range of applications available as highly beneficial to improve their productivity and operational effectiveness. Subscribing to, and paying for, these services on a ‘per seat’ or ‘per user’ basis can be the best way of delivering new IT solutions when compared to installing similar products on servers run in-house.

Cloud services have changed the way that businesses store information, manage documents, and communicate with others.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), or Internet hosted telephony, services have exploded over the last five years; and these are an IaaS solution which requires a calculated and consistent upload capability, with predictable delays and protocol support, to ensure high call quality.

How do you calculate the impact of IaaS on Business Connectivity?

Predicting the amount of bandwidth you require for any one service can be difficult, at the best of times, but any good supplier should be able to discuss a planning model with you that quantifies the capacity needed when the solution is first installed; and how this may change over time as your business and the number of employees grows. One of the biggest benefits for your company is that through the adoption of cloud services technology new employees can be located anywhere, in the office, at home, in a different country even; but assuming they are all office based how do you decide what bandwidth you need from your Internet connectivity?

Example

The Stamford Telephone Company work frequently with businesses of 10 staff in size, or larger, and manage the deployment of their broadband, network switching and IP telephony services; our experience provides us with the ability to judge the Internet solution to deploy, but, how do we help you calculate the bandwidth levels required?

The service we focus on delivering to the highest possible level of quality is the IP telephony service; all the control and management of which is in the cloud. Every phone deployed requires an uplink bandwidth of 100kbit/s so a customer with 10 phones needs an Internet service with a minimum of 1Mbit/s capacity to maintain good quality speech during peak periods. Many ADSL services across the UK still only support uplink capacities of 1.5Mbit/s which only leaves 500kbit/s for data transfer. To put this in to context an email will typically require 20 to 150kbit/s for it to be sent to the recipient; this means that as few as 3 emails could be sent at a time during peak periods in your business.

With 10 staff only a third of the workforce could be productive during the busiest periods of the day!

How much is this lost productivity worth to you in operational expenditure?

If you could double the productivity of your business by installing a fibre broadband service with 3 to 4 times the uplink capacity of your ADSL broadband service how could that improve your bottom line?

Connectivity Options

In order to prevent operational issues as described in this example, businesses need to consider the effects of IaaS solutions on their connectivity capacity. The cost of finding a good connectivity solution, that meets your requirements, should be built in to every case produced by your business when considering growth and development.

If you are experiencing capacity issues with your Internet connection, get in contact and we can guide you through the connectivity options that will best suit your business needs.

For further information please fill out our Contact Form or call Stamford Telephone Company on 01780 430490