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Business internet

Bandwidth Bandits

Internet bandwidth use is continually on the up and is further stimulated each time we roll out faster broadband services.

As the UK ISP community lines itself up to offer 40Mbps broadband based on BT’s Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) proposition it is worth looking at what services and applications businesses are going to use that will take advantage of the increased speeds.

I’m going to start a Bandwidth Bandit thread on trefor.net. A Bandwidth Bandit is an application that uses lots of bandwidth. Deleted in the great category cull of February 2014 🙂

So what do I hear you ask? The point is that it is easy to look at the consumer world and see how someone sitting at home watching online TV might benefit from the access speeds supported by FTTC. Full screen, HD for example. However this isn’t going to turn on a business.

The owner of a business is more likely to say “I don’t want to promote TV watching on my company’s internet connection because it will distract staff from their job”.

Every time I look at the drivers for faster internet access the industry has always come up with the same story – better file transfers and better quality video. Now the use of video has still not really taken off in business, other than the occasional educational stream coming from someone’s website.

So I want to take a look at the bandwidth needs of different applications and see whether faster broadband is really going to facilitate a change in the way businesses work. I guess the biggest enabler is quite likely to be faster uplink. FTTC will in theory support “up to” 5Mbps.

Posts are going to appear on this subject from time to time over the next few weeks. In the meantime if anyone wants to contribute or point me towards material that is likely to add value here please feel free to do so.

As a footnote a business typically uses twice as much bandwidth per broadband connection that a consumer despite the impression one might get from some areas of industry that all consumers do is sit on their broadband connections downloading music and video. Apart from the fact that the business ADSL is more likely to have more people sat behind it using accessing the internet it must also mean that there are an increasing number of applications out there wanting the bandwidth.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

2 replies on “Bandwidth Bandits”

very interesting collection James and a good illustration of the move towards hosted environments. Fact is the more people use these services the better their experience will be if they have faster connectivity. If response time are almost instant that will keep people using them.

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