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Cut Down Bandwidth Cost!

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Be it cloud services or hosted model one thing that defines success of these services is bandwidth. Having no regulation on bandwidth usage would lead mission critical applications craving for it, while some non business related downloads like movies and music eating away major chunk of bandwidth pipe. Even if employees are not allowed to download any media your network can still choke thanks to number of websites allowing users to watch videos or listen to music or radio online. So we decided to try to find out actually how much bandwidth is used by a regular user. But before we get to this, we should know what all applications eat away bandwidth. We would also give you mathematics of bandwidth used by some common application today's employee cannot live without. Based on this data and average cost of bandwidth in country we would give out recommendations that could actually bring down your bandwidth cost by half.

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Common websites, applications that eat bandwidth.

We zeroed down on 3 websites and 3 applications that are popular across the world. Next step was to find out average bandwidth used by these applications/websites. Here is a list of common applications/websites that could be responsible for bandwidth crunch.

YouTube

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This online video sharing website needs no introduction and is the website for watching videos, be it funny videos or trailer of a latest flick you would find everything here. Besides entertainment, there is no dearth of informative content on this website which can actually be quite beneficial. Availability of HD content on this site may be good news for regular user but at the same time would need better bandwidth for hassle free viewing. Problem comes when this 'regular user' is sitting inside corporate network and eating away precious bandwidth.

Facebook

This website has become synonym for social network and is the most popular website. Today even businesses are utilizing this site for enhancing visibility. But the number of people using this site for business would be low; majority of users are more interested in socializing. People have found this mode of communication far more interesting and if your organization uses human work force and Internet, employees are bound to deviate to this site.

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TwitterDeck

Twitter as a micro blogging site is addictive for sure, and its popularity is quite phenomenal. A site where you can speak your mind in few lines has world hooked to it. With micro blogs leading to implications as grave as people losing ministerial post, modern employee just cannot live without it. Major chunk of people use TwitterDeck application rather than going to three different websites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace).

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Gtalk and Yahoo messenger

Two of the most famous messengers are now capable of voice and video chat and even if they are not being used, they keep pinging server to find out status changes. This behavior and features can lead to major bandwidth consumption.

Online music

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How do you do a work that is monotonous and requires mechanical behavior rather than concentration? You just put on those head phones and listen to music while you do your work. But if this music is from online source you are using up your employers money for personal purpose.

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Monitoring bandwidth

There are plenty of tools that can be used to monitor what traffic is being generated by your machine. Simple one is Windows Task Manager. Click on 'networking' tab to find out what is the current usage in percentage, however, you cannot find out bandwidth used by particular host. So we started searching for a software tool that can give us bandwidth utilized per process, and our search ended with 'Network Traffic Monitor' from Nico Cuppen Software. A 7 day trial of software is available at http://tinyurl.com/5s9bkh6 . Download 'nt.exe' file which is 2.58 MB in size. This file supports Windows 7 and the best part is that there is not even a boring registration form you have to fill before download. Simply install this tool on a machine and start using it. Once you install Network Traffic Monitor, you get animated window showing how much bandwidth is consumed by particular process. Network Traffic Monitor shows you which process in your machine are causing TCP/IP network traffic, how much traffic that is, and over which IP ports this traffic takes place. For each process it can show detailed information, including the path to the process executable, the remote IP address the process is connected to, and the WHOIS information of that IP address. One can also generate historic report on any process in .xls format for future documentation; click on 'History>Export' and you have your report ready.

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Money and mathematics

We know five applications that eat bandwidth and we have a tool that can give us idea about what bandwidth is consumed by a process. Next is to find out what bandwidth each of them consume. There are lots of approximations in the calculation but this would give you an idea about how things work. In this experiment, we used a single machine and took different readings over a period of time per application/website for averaging out. Check out the table that shows average bandwidth consumption per second by each of the above mentioned applications. Here we found out that YouTube is far ahead of others in consuming bandwidth while Facebook and Online Music stand second. Finally both messengers and TwitterDeck consume least bandwidth. We also calculated that at average around 1.7 Mb of unnecessary data is transferred per seconds. Now let us assume a company with a 4Mb/s of bandwidth pipe, this means almost 50% of pipe is used up by all these applications/websites. This also means you are paying of data transfer which is of no benefit to organization. Now assume how much unnecessary data would be transferred if there are 500 employees in your company and you have allowed few/all of these applications. To be on safer side, all these applications/websites should have restricted access.

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