Optimising bandwidth usage has become a fundamental as far as the management of an enterprise or corporate ICT infrastructure is concerned.

Quality of Service (QoS) is already rife in the market and matching up bandwidth to the most business-critical applications, in order to run voice over a network for example, is about working smarter and soliciting more value out of existing tools than relying on a short-term solution and quick results.

Optimised or optimal bandwidth usage is really about getting the most out available bandwidth in order to improve business processes. Companies continue to invest in high-performance, enterprise-wide applications and systems and require more bandwidth as a result.

In order to ensure maximum output from applications, the business is required to prioritise applications in terms of available bandwidth - so, for example, if a company wanted to run voice over a network, it would have to assign the optimised bandwidth to voice and will not offer priority to e-mail. The reason is because voice has latency in it and a pause would be immediately detectable. Another example is assigning bandwidth to accounting system applications and taking priority off file sharing.

The approach really should be on a case-by-case basis.

What is interesting to note is the priority of voice over broadband. This is not available or offered from a network operator's point of view, hence the necessity for third party products. There is talk of the use of the 802.16 protocol which allows QoS for voice applications running over broadband.

Although the protocol is said to be encapsulated within some current broadband network offerings, it is unlikely to come into use as a service for some time.

Once in operation, however, this will allow users to conduct business-related telephone calls over a broadband link, whether wired or wireless, at no additional cost other than their current bandwidth cost.

Can people run voice over broadband? Yes, this is possible and there are applications that work very well within the SoHo environment, but this is not a reliable and trusted technology for corporate telephony. The challenge comes back to bandwidth optimisation - because one cannot prioritise bandwidth for that particular application, it would share data power with all other applications. When it comes to voice, one really needs that optimisation.

In order to ensure higher levels of bandwidth optimisation, businesses can make use of a range of third party tools, readily available and designed specifically for this purpose. Alternatively, as apposed to assigning a certain amount of bandwidth to a certain application, depending on how business-critical it is, one can optimise bandwidth further by reducing unnecessary traffic - such as spam. This seems to account for approximately one in four e-mails, at a minimum, as well as phising and viruses flowing over the line.

Essentially, the business has the option to take a phased approach to investment and not go the whole hog on the first day. A popular development is to implement anti-spam, anti-phising and anti-virus tools on the core of the service provider's network. This would then eliminate threats before they travel over the line. It is common practice to address those issues and keep threats out of the Local Area Network.

The main objective, at the end of the day, is to ensure that users enjoy the maximum benefit of applications and have the best experience with the technology that can be attained.