- The use of automated tools for continuous bandwidth monitoring can provide real-time insights and detailed analysis.
- Restructuring how data is routed within the network, including creating subnets and optimising network design, can help minimise latency.
- Scheduling data-intensive tasks such as backups and updates during off-peak hours can prevent network congestion and ensure bandwidth is available.
In today’s digital-first world, it’s really important for any company to make sure their network is performing at its best. Bandwidth is basically the maximum rate at which data can be transferred over a network. It plays a big part in how efficiently and quickly data can move. Just like lanes on a highway, the more bandwidth you have, the more data can flow at once. This means faster and more reliable internet and network services.
If you want your network to handle high volumes of data without lagging, you need to implement strategies that optimise and increase bandwidth. There are lots of techniques you can use to improve how data moves through your network, from employing automated monitoring tools to restructuring data flow. These improvements are not just about adding more bandwidth but optimizing its usage to achieve maximum efficiency and performance.
What is bandwidth
Bandwidth refers to the maximum data transfer rate of a network – how much data can be sent and received at any one time. Think of it as the width of a motorway: the wider the motorway, the more cars (data) can travel at the same time. If you need to move a large amount of data, a higher bandwidth (more lanes) will allow you to move it faster than a lower bandwidth network.
How do you test bandwidth
Bandwidth is measured in gigabits per second (Gbps), megabits per second (Mbps), or bits per second (bps), and your Internet service provider (ISP) assigns a level based on your plan. If you are experiencing slow network performance, assessing your bandwidth usage can help you identify which devices or applications are using too much.
Manually tracking bandwidth on a device-by-device basis can be time-consuming and often impractical. Typically, this involves examining usage on individual devices to identify high-consumption applications and, where possible, accessing traffic statistics through administrative tools on routers, firewalls or switches. However, these methods don’t provide the historical insight or overall usage trends that are critical for comprehensive analysis.
For a more effective approach, automated bandwidth monitoring tools are recommended. These tools provide a centralised, continuous view of network usage, delivering real-time insights and detailed metrics that help pinpoint the source of bandwidth problems and ensure more efficient network management.
Steps to increase bandwidth
Understand your current network performance: Before you can start taking steps to optimise your performance, you need to understand the current state of your performance and bandwidth. The best way to do this is to use a network performance monitor and bandwidth analyser.
Also read: Understanding bandwidth in optimisation techniques
Streamline your data flows: When it comes to improving your network performance, you want to make sure that your data flows from one point to another are as streamlined and efficient as possible. Creating subnets for different parts of your network and changing topologies can help streamline your data flows and reduce areas where bottlenecks occur.
Optimise the data itself: One of the best ways to increase bandwidth is to optimise your data through techniques such as load balancing and traffic shaping. Through these optimisation efforts, you can make the data use less bandwidth overall, or create a prioritisation system to make your most critical data behave as if there’s more bandwidth available than there actually is. You can apply data optimisation at multiple points in your network.
Also read: How can an application load balancer optimise your web traffic?
Get rid of unnecessary data on your network: You need to ensure that your organisation has a clear policy on what applications, websites and services can be accessed over your corporate network. You can even create blacklists and whitelists to help you deal with overly bandwidth-intensive services and websites. It is also a good idea to create an email attachment policy so that your employees know how to send data over your network more efficiently.
Make sure you’re backing up and updating at the right time: Backups and updates are essential for any organisation, but they also consume a lot of bandwidth and can even shut down some of your network functions. If you don’t perform these operations at strategic times, you can create latency and degrade network performance. Make sure that all your backups and updates take place outside of normal working hours so that the network is free when your staff need it.
Invest in a tool to increase bandwidth: If you really want to increase your bandwidth, the best way to do this is to invest in a network performance tool that provides traffic and bandwidth monitoring and analysis. These tools will give you the understanding of your current network and bandwidth that you need to take steps to improve performance, and they can also help you take targeted steps to increase bandwidth without investing in unnecessary hardware.
