Is It Really the Bandwidth?

Is It Really the Bandwidth?

Three Steps to Diagnose Bandwidth Complaints

We’ve all been there. You place a simple lunch order at a restaurant, speak for a while with your dining companions, and then someone at the table realizes a lot of time has passed since you ordered. The waiter is nowhere to be found. What the problem is—late food—is the issue for you, not why it’s late. You could care less whether the kitchen is slow, or the waiter leaves the plates stacked up under heat lamps, the results are the same: no food.

What do you say to the manager? “Where’s my food?”

It’s the same when employees sit down at a computer. They’re not thinking about how anything on it works, just it should work—and work fast. A decade or two ago, they might have blamed poor performance on a slow or unreliable PC, but these days most employees have enough computing power on their desks to power a mission into deep space. In an environment where more and more productivity applications live in the cloud or on a server in a remote corporate data center, the network really is the computer. When employees experience latency on a VoIP call or can’t access Salesforce.com, they see it as a service not delivered on time, like diners impatient for their food. But in this case, they sum up the problem in one word: “bandwidth.” Clearly, this crummy corporate network isn’t providing the bandwidth they need to get their work done. Isn’t it obvious?