5 Ways to Reduce Bandwidth Usage on Your Network

Bandwidth is a broad term that means the bit rate measure of transmission capacity through a network communication system or network capacity. Hein in his article explains that bandwidth refers to the maximum amount of data that can be transferred through your network. What is meant is that in a network, bandwidth is responsible for transporting data that will then be processed at once. Usually bandwidth is in a physical or wireless communication network. For IT and network engineers, this term must be familiar and they know that the larger the network, the more bandwidth is used to handle transfers that occur every day. Therefore, analyzing bandwidth usage is necessary, especially for companies that always use networks for the smooth running of their business.

So what will happen if you don’t monitor bandwidth usage? One of the consequences is that it can affect network performance. This is because the network has a capacity limit and data transfer speed. Conversely, with network performance monitoring (NPM), you don’t need to worry because NPM can determine where and when transmission problems occur on the network and can also observe how much bandwidth is used at one time. Here are 5 ways to reduce bandwidth usage.

1. Cache Your Website
   This first method can reduce your website’s bandwidth usage. The way to do this is by setting an expiration date in the HTTPS header so that your visitors’ browsers will refresh the content after a certain amount of time. This allows their browsers to store a copy of your website, and pages are served from the copy in the browser instead of your web server every time a visitor visits your website.
2. Malware Scanning
   As you know, malware is very dangerous and can cause various kinds of network disruptions. By using network performance monitoring (NPM), you can detect malware automatically or manually. If abnormal bandwidth usage caused by malware is detected, NPM will alert you.
3. Make text short and simple
   This third method is quite easy, you have to find and remove unnecessary text or images. Make sure everything is as small and as little as possible.
4. Identify Bandwidth Hogs
   What is meant by bandwidth hogs? According to technopedia, bandwidth hogs is a general term for internet users who use more bandwidth than other users on the same network. Another term is heavy internet users. NPM can solve this problem. This is because NPM can determine which devices and users are using the most bandwidth on the network and notify the network team. So that the next steps can be taken.
5. Quality of Service
   The last way is quality of service which refers to the network’s ability to allocate and order resources for applications or data flows. Network performance monitoring with this capability can help prevent devices from interfering with each other in using bandwidth and operating properly.

References:

https://www.technopedia.com/definition/5445/bandwidth

https://www.technopedia.com/definition/23178/bandwidth-hog

5 Ways to Reduce Bandwidth Usage on Your Networks

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