News

Who’s Stealing Your Bandwidth?

Leader in Unified Communications Educates Businesses on the Importance of Proper Internet Utilization and Best Practices

ALEXANDRIA, VA — December 15, 2014 — The Washington Network, Inc., a leading provider in unified communications, announced today that the company is educating its customers on the recent expansion of bandwidth monitoring and management solutions. Essentially, bandwidth monitoring is the practice and policy of tracking the utilization of company bandwidth between all employees, software applications and desktops. The growth of bandwidth management solutions in recent years is due primarily to growth of company provided and personal devices (smart phones, tablets, etc.) connected to an organization’s network. 

 According to Rick Endres, President of The Washington Network, “Any company that provides cloud-devices, software or applications that run over a data network, need to ensure that bandwidth is being consumed properly.” This notion reflects the current state of most solutions, which are simply being strained to the point where many business owners notice that the devices, applications and software under perform. In essence, it’s like siphoning out all of the gas from a car, and then blaming the car for running on fumes. The problem lies with poor policy making and a lack of guidelines for employees on how to properly utilize the Internet at a place of business.

 “On many occasions, we’ve found that up to 40% of a company’s employees are choking bandwidth and making it harder for other people to do their work,” Endres added. “We conduct quarterly reviews with our customers where we assess the performance of all of the technology that we provide. It gives our clients a global perspective on their network and what its performance is and how it can be better. Our overarching goal is to make sure that our customers’ businesses are performing at more productive levels and this is how we quantify productivity. This is why we lead these meetings with device performance audits. With bandwidth being the central resource upon which nearly every technology relies, we have to make sure that this is being consumed in accordance with best practices before any other steps are taken.”

In addition, to the underperformance of the network and the drain on productivity this can cause, many business owners appreciate technology audits, like the one provided by The Washington Network, because they uncover how much time employees are spending on various sites that have nothing to do with their job. This gives tremendous insight on the productivity, or lack thereof, with certain employees. One of the quickest ways to immediately boost customer profitability is to restrict the bandwidth of employees to sites to those that are exclusively productive in nature, as opposed to entertainment-based sites.

 “In some cases, employees simply don’t know that their bandwidth consumption is slowing the rest of the team down. New parents can put their children in day care and want to stream the video from time to time to see how their child is doing throughout the day. Inherently there’s nothing wrong with this, if done on occasion. However, when a parent leaves one of these streaming videos up while they begin working on other things, the rest of the team will notice the lag time that slows down their own desktop. The network is simply a shared resource that needs some guidelines in place, especially in the new employee handbook. With a comprehensive bandwidth consumption policy in place, business owners can rest assured that their software, hardware and online tools will all function at optimal levels.” 

 ABOUT THE WASHINGTON NETWORK, INC.

 Founded in 1987, The Washington Network, Inc. in Alexandria, Virginia, provides computer networks, VoIP phone systems, IT support and other technology solutions for associations and businesses in the Washington, DC Metro area. 
Serving clients without a large in-house IT staff, The Washington Network lowers operating costs while increasing worker productivity. The company’s flat-rate managed services include remote network monitoring, preventive maintenance, help desk, redundant back-ups and on-site support. 
A member of the Northern Virginia Technology Council and Alexandria Chamber of Commerce, The Washington Network has been honored as the Chamber’s Professional Service Business of the Year. Through its strategic membership in the Technology Assurance Group, The Washington Network serves and supports clients with multiple locations across the U.S. and Canada.

 The Washington Network is located at 3601 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia 22304. 
For more information on The Washington Network, call 703.345.4000 or visit www.WashingtonNetwork.com
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