Bandwidth Is So Cheap, Why Do I Need WAN Optimization?
Bandwidth is no longer a fancy and expensive requirement for networks. Thanks to competition among bandwidth providers and developments in technology, bandwidth is constantly getting cheaper. As a result, upgrading bandwidth is often the first solution many IT engineers and system managers think of when faced with WAN problems. The question is, does upgrading your bandwidth ultimately solve these problems? Speeding up data transfer Upgrading your bandwidth throughput can speed up data transmission when a lot of data needs to move at once, but widening the pipe is not always enough. There are times when your WAN will still be slow despite not using all of the available bandwidth. Why? Latency. Latency is the time needed for a packet to travel from one designated point to another. The farther the distance that data has to travel, the higher the latency is. Because packets and acknowledgments of receipt are moving back and forth many times to move a file or interact with an