Bandwidth requirements have changed since you last checked the capacity you are using. As your company grows, you use more apps that need more bandwidth. So one of the features that Dallas managed IT services provider CTG offers customers allows you to regularly check your bandwidth, which helps you determine whether you have a bandwidth issue vs. slow computers.

Understanding Bandwidth

Many people hear and read the term “bandwidth” and have somewhat of an idea what it means since it applies to Internet costs. Everyone who pays Internet providers knows that the more bandwidth they use, the better the quality of the online experience and the higher the cost.

The term has different meanings for different technologies, which can be confusing, but the concept is the similar. Communication travels through channels, whether it’s through a wire or the air. Bandwidth represents the number of channels that information travels through to get from a source to its receiver. Generally speaking, the more channels used to deliver a message, the wider the bandwidth, which is why audio quality and video resolution improve with increasing bandwidth.

A 14k dial-up phone line, for example, has a very thin sound. But when you bundle several phone lines together to create an ISDN line or a T-1 line, you get a much cleaner sound, which is usually the case with high speed Internet connections. Technically speaking, Internet bandwidth relates to capacity for data packets to travel distances measured by rates of speed.

Expansion of Broadband

Prior to the 21st century, the term “bandwidth” was commonly associated with analog media, such as radio and television. As computers and Internet technology advanced, the term took on new meaning in digital forms. Most consumers used slow, clunky dial-up phone connections to get their Internet connections in the 90s, while better quality broadband connections were much more expensive and reserved for multimedia professionals.

Beginning in the 2002-2003 era, managed IT services providers in Dallas and Internet service providers were able to offer broadband at an affordable rate for consumers, which helped revolutionize the Internet. It allowed most Americans to enjoy streaming audio and videos online without buffering interruptions.

Bits Per Second

While the bandwidth of radio or sound frequencies are measured in cycles per second or Hertz, bandwidth in computing or Internet connections are measured in bits per second (bps), or variants such as:

• kilobits per second (kbps or kbit/s)
• megabits per second (mbps or Mbit/s)
• gigabits per second (gbps or Gbit/s)

The faster data can travel through wired or wireless connections, the higher the rate of bits per second. If you need to send multimedia files over the Internet, such as large video files, you can benefit from wider bandwidth than consumer high speed Internet connections, if you want to speed up delivery.

It’s important to learn the difference between upstream and downstream network communication. Upstream means sending data across the Internet, whereas downstream means downloading data from the Internet. Downstream requires more bandwidth than upstream.

Conclusion

In the United States, bandwidth is defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for communications technologies. In general, the more data you store or send, the more bandwidth you need. Visit Dallas managed IT services provider CTG Tech (https://www.ctgmanagedit.com/) to learn more about how you can maximize bandwidth to help meet the needs as your business expands.