Business Internet Connection and Bandwidth Considerations 101
For any organization internet access should be planned. Internet access can be as simple as a pc directly connected to the internet over dialup. For large corporations it can be a multimillion dollar contract that takes many professionals to manage and secure. Businesses need to consider what there needs are and then make a educated decision about what to get. For example a branch office or a franchised office may not be able to access centralized computer systems thus turning away all customers. At other firms it may merely be that the manager is unable to check his e-mail from work. Firms need to secure their networks with firewalls and manage one of the largest issues with all services, cost. Speed, reliability, and cost are the largest factors for most businesses when selecting internet access. This primer will teach you enough to approach this with enough information to make an educated decision and come out a little better than the next business.
Eliminate bandwidth hogs
There are two common things that generate on abnormally high amount of traffic: file sharing and internet radio. Peer to peer file sharing is generally illegal and is widely used to exchange large music files, movies, pictures, and software frequently violation of copyright laws. The impact of this to the industries claiming losses are openly debated, but either way it should not be allowed at work. This eats bandwidth by transferring very large files across the internet and possibly distributing them. This can easily be blocked by a firewall. Also internet radio transfers a constant audio signal to the listening computer consistently eating bandwidth in the process. This can be firewalled as well, but is more difficult and there are ways around it. This too should be blocked unless there is a business case for it (and disabled for the rest of the organization). If you have an existing firewall block ports 1214, 4661-4672, 6257,6699, 6881-6889, 6346 for file sharing. Block multicast IP addresses 232.0.0.0 - 233.255.255.255 and 239.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255. If you do not have a firewall ask your local computer store for a firewall and they can configure it for you, or show you how. These firewalls normally cost around $40 and a nominal amount for the configuration which should take less than 10 minutes including setup. Having a firewall installed is best practices anyway. Try firewalling these hogs and telling employees not to use them before upgrading your business’s internet connection if it seems slow.
Please continue to the next page: Bandwidth needed for the internet connection