If you've been thinking about bandwidth in terms of "faster is better" then you're not alone but you're probably focused on the wrong thing.
Here is a primer for you:
- Bandwidth is not speed. Bandwidth is the size of the connection and has an indirect relationship with how fast your data will travel across the network
- Speed is actually how fast your data travels to and from where it needs to go.
- Latency measures how fast/slow your packets of data travel to and from a particular destination. The less latency the better
- Packet loss is just as it sounds, how many packets of data are simply "lost" in the network to and from any given destination. Accept nothing less than perfection from your provider on this
- Jitter is the consistency of speed across the network
Here is a simple analogy: pretend five cars are racing toward the same destination. Then pretend that the road they're using is a 50-lane highway. Latency would be the measurement of how long it took those five cars to get to the destination. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway. Jitter is how much variation there is among the five cars (if the first car got there in 1 minute and the last car in 1 hour, then it could be said that is a high amount of jitter)So if you focus on buying a 50-lane highway for your enterprise that may be fine but you are missing the bigger picture, especially if you're in a global or dispersed organization that has many applications or communications running across the network.
For starters, is that highway a longer distance to get to your most important destinations? Is there a network of roads that could get you there faster but perhaps not with as many lanes? What is theoretically better, a two lane road that gets you there in half the time or a 50-lane highway that takes twice as long?
The truth is, you can't easily get behind the curtain with most of the major network providers around the globe, so determining the best network connection for your enterprise is a challenge. There are however a few things you can do to make sure that you're optimizing your choice in a network provider and they are unashamedly:
1) Work with Stellis Technology Advisors who can act as a no fee, single point of contact in the sales process to help facilitate the best choice for a provider.
2) Make sure that SLAs are aggressive and structured for the type of network traffic you're doing today and will be doing in the future
3) Make sure that your provider offers the kind of dynamic tools needed to be flexible. (Taking from the analogy above, where you're going today may not be the same destination you'll be going in the future, so keep your options open). These include elastic network tools, real-time network monitoring and port sizes that are suitable to current and future needs.
