Bandwidth management is a process to optimize and distribute a network’s internet bandwidth. This helps businesses allocate bandwidth to important operations while maintaining reliability for guest WiFi and other operations. Overall, bandwidth management helps reduce network congestion, can affect productivity, and improves customer experience.
How Bandwidth Management Affects Network Performance
In unmanaged networks, activities like HD streaming or large file downloads can slow down network speed. With bandwidth management, businesses can make sure important operations maintain connection during peak times. Effective bandwidth management also helps mitigate overuse by limiting usage for non-critical activities.
Key Benefits of Effective Bandwidth Management
- Increased Reliability: Businesses can minimize slowdowns and outages.
- Allocation Optimization: Businesses can improve or maintain productivity by making sure important operations receive adequate bandwidth.
- Savings: Optimizing bandwidth can improve network efficiency, allowing networks to do more with less equipment.
- Enhanced Experience: Fast and reliable WiFi for guests becomes a mainstay through optimized bandwidth management.
- Better Visibility: Regular monitoring provides insight into network health and usage.
What Are the Key Techniques for Bandwidth Monitoring?
Bandwidth monitoring involves tracking data across your network to maintain performance. Here are some techniques that help manage and distribute bandwidth more efficiently:
- Traffic Shaping: This method controls the flow of data, prioritizing certain types of traffic like VoIP or video conferencing while limiting bandwidth-heavy activities like file downloads or guest streaming.
- Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): DPI analyzes data packets in real-time. It’s useful for ensuring business functions remain unaffected during peak hours.
- Quality of Service (QoS): QoS settings allow you to prioritize data or user groups, preventing congestion that could slow business operations.
- Rate Limiting: This restricts the data transfer rate for specific users or apps, preventing them from using more bandwidth than needed.
Strategies to Overcome Bandwidth Congestion Issues
Once bottlenecks or congestion points are identified, there are several strategies to reduce their impact:
- Implement Quality of Service (QoS): Prioritize bandwidth for critical applications (e.g., VoIP, point-of-sale systems) to maintain uptime during peak hours.
- Apply Bandwidth Throttling: Limit non-essential traffic, especially during high-traffic periods. Alternatively, you can implement tiered network plans to monetize your bandwidth.
- Upgrade Your Network Infrastructure: Upgrading routers and switches can improve your overall capacity to improve and manage bandwidth.
- Use Traffic Shaping: Control the network flow by adjusting how different types of traffic move through your network.
By proactively addressing these challenges, businesses can maintain high network performance.
Paid WiFi by Purple
Paid WiFi from Purple allows businesses to monetize bandwidth by allowing guests to purchase bandwidth allocations. Here are some benefits of tiered bandwidth:
- Prioritize Business Operations: Allocate more bandwidth to essential functions like point-of-sale systems or inventory management.
- Create Premium WiFi Options: Offer different tiers of WiFi access to guests. For example, provide basic access for free and a higher-speed tier for paying customers.
Providing unlimited bandwidth to guests could strain your network and waste resources.