THE SIMPLECOM BLOG

If you answered “yes” to any of these, then your slow WAN (Wide Area Network) provider may be what is causing your business network to seem more like a ‘parking lot’ and explain why the daily complaints of slow internet and horrible call quality are hitting your inbox. But why? You pay for reliable, fast Internet and it should be able to handle your business traffic, yes? Well... yes and no. You pay for bandwidth – but your actual throughput is what you experience. There are a thousand descriptions for how an Internet Service Provider may describe how fast their service is and how their connections work. We will try to take a second to explain this in the simplest terms possible – or the SimpleCom way if you would. First – let's get the definitions out of the way. Bandwidth is the potential (or theoretical) speed of your Internet connection. Some describe is at the ‘carrying capacity’ of the network. Bottom line - it’s how much ‘pipe’ you buy and what (you think) the ISP should make available. (We will skip the bandwidth of your LAN for now - that’s another discussion). Throughput is the actual (real-world) speed of the network. This is what your office workers experience when they try to access applications in the cloud, or stream video, or send an email. Throughput is the thing that impacts the productivity of the business workday and has a great impact on everything from your Voice-over-IP calls, to your email attachments getting sent. You may pay for a wide-pipe, but if your throughput sucks, it doesn’t matter. Here’s another way to look at it. You’ve heard of internet speed, right? It’s what all the ISP’s use to sell their services. Popular ISP’s (like cable companies) sell packages that promise things like 300 Mbps (Megabits per second) for internet speed. In our industry we call that bandwidth. That is the theoretical speed limit for ‘the road’ you’re traveling. The network is the type road you drive on. Think of it this way: A 2-lane country road gets you where you want to go, just not too fast (low bandwidth) A freeway with 6 lanes gets you to your destination faster (high bandwidth) Connections like DSL, T1, or Satellite service is that country road.

As the COVID-19 pandemic puts pressure on our country's businesses to work from home, the SimpleCom support team helps our clients work from home using tools like One Talk and Cradlepoint.

We have all seen them. The responses from seemingly every company we've ever given our email to. In fact, this we sent our own which you might have received. There were the standard responses to any email we send to our database. The auto-replies, the opens, and the unsubscribes. And in typical fashion, Brian McKeon the president of SimpleCom, answered this person with a very SimpleCom-ly reply.