Investing in more bandwidth? Don’t get charged extra to use it

Every company needs adequate bandwidth for their business to operate efficiently or, in many cases, to operate at all. Internet providers generally have packages that include bandwidth — the maximum data transfer rate of your Internet connection — to match the number of employees in your business. However, for businesses with content production and/or distribution at their core, those standard packages no longer apply due to the need to regularly move large video files, mostly a result of more and more productions being done entirely in 4K.

Transferring large files using standard Internet protocols is very slow and prone to failure. In fact, moving anything over about 1 Gigabyte, especially if any distance is involved, becomes difficult. But simply increasing your bandwidth or “buying a bigger pipe” alone doesn’t solve the problem. Employing UDP-based acceleration technology is necessary to take advantage of an increase in bandwidth.

Why increasing bandwidth doesn’t always work

Increasing bandwidth alone doesn’t always result in faster large files transfers because conventional Internet protocols like TCP and FTP don’t work optimally when large files and long distances are involved. Latency and network congestion cause transfers to slow, cancelling out any added benefits of increased bandwidth.

A more advance transport protocol, such as Signiant’s acceleration technology, minimizes the impact of latency and network congestion so that the entire pipe can be filled with data. Additionally, Signiant’s protocol plays nicely with other network traffic, while still moving large files much faster. (See how much faster with our File Transfer Calculator.)

Careful, some acceleration providers charge for bandwidth

However, there is another catch. While Internet providers understandably charge more for bandwidth and many media companies are willing to pay for extra connectivity, some acceleration software providers charge based on bandwidth usage and will only enable full bandwidth usage for a premium price.

That means media companies end up getting a double hit for improving their network connection speed. Our customers have told us that they don’t like bandwidth-based pricing, so we have never employed it.