How to explain bandwidth to collegue?

CSCO10312019 · ‎12-23-2009

Recently, the company I work for upgraded the VPN circuit between our ISP from 10MB to 16MB.

Latency has been reduced dramatically! VoIP service has improved markedly.

However, one of my collegues noticed that bandwidth utilization never exceeds 3MB. Bandwidth utilization averages 1.5MB with brief spikes above 2MB, sometimes reaching 3MB, but never higher. My collegue wants to see bandwidth utilization numbers even higher! How can I explain to my collegue that we do not want to see higher bandwidth utilization numbers?

Our network performance is excellent overall.

Ganesh Hariharan · ‎12-23-2009

Hi,

Genrally Bandwidth is reffered to a chunk of data which need to tranfer from one end to other end .

1)In computer networks, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate - the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second). This kind of bandwidth is usually expressed in bits (of data) per second (bps). Occasionally, it's expressed as bytes per second (Bps). A modem that works at 57,600 bps hastwice the bandwidth of a modem that works at 28,800 bps. In general, a link with a high bandwidth is one that may be able to carry enough information to sustain the succession of images in a video presentation.

It should be remembered that a real communications path usually consists of a succession of links, each with its own bandwidth. If one of these is much slower than the rest, it is said to be a bandwidth bottleneck.

2) In electronic communication, bandwidth is the width of the range (or band) of frequencies that an electronic signal uses on a given transmission medium. In this usage, bandwidth is expressed in terms of the difference between the highest-frequency signal component and the lowest-frequency signal component. Since the frequency of a signal is measured in hertz (the number of cycles of change per second), a given bandwidth is the difference in hertz between the highest frequency the signal uses and the lowest frequency it uses. A typical voice signal has a bandwidth of approximately three kilohertz (3 kHz); an analog television (TV) broadcast video signal has a bandwidth of six megahertz (6 MHz) -- some 2,000 times as wide as the voice signal.

Hope that helps to clear your query !!

Regards

Ganesh.H

CSCO10312019 · ‎12-23-2009

Ganseh,

Your answer helps. However, how do I explain to my collegue that one of the "succession of links" could be causing a bottleneck? And, how do we identify where the bottleneck is? My collegue seems to believe that a VPN provides guaranteed bandwidth end-to-end. I know that after our traffic enters our ISP's network our traffic passes through several other service providers, and once the traffic enters another providers network there is no guaranteed bandwidth.

Ganesh Hariharan · ‎12-23-2009

Genrally they used to provide in MPLS VPN circuit and if you want to test the bottleneck where exactly is getting struck that is little difficult but yes you can test that max. bandwidth limit which has been provided to you is givne or not like in your case 16 MB.

If you want to test just make ftp connection between your two sites and upload with huge amount of traffic and then you can see the max. limit of your bandwidth allotted.As ftp is bandwidth greedy protocol so it will fetch maximum to maximum bandwidth while uploading or at downloading.

At the same time you can download tools like bandwidth meter to check the max bandwidth utilization at your end and if you have the access of outgoing router you can check at the inteface also by show inteface command.

Hope this helps out your query !!

Regards

Ganesh.H

Leo Laohoo · ‎01-05-2010

Tell your colleague to "Google it".