🚨More Bandwidth is Not the Answer | Why Businesses Need Smarter Connectivity, Not Bigger Pipes💡

Ronald BartelsRonald Bartels
5 min read

If you’ve ever dealt with an ISP sales rep, you’ve probably heard this pitch:

"Your business needs a 1 Gbps fibre connection! It’ll make everything faster and solve all your problems!"

🚨 It’s a lie. 🚨

More bandwidth does not make your business applications faster. It does not fix network congestion. And throwing more bandwidth at your problems is like buying a bigger car to fix traffic jams—it just doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the real truth: business connectivity is not about raw bandwidth—it’s about latency, stability, and traffic management. And that’s where Fusion’s SD-WAN changes the game.


1. The Bandwidth Myth | Businesses Don’t Need as Much as You Think

Most businesses dramatically overestimate how much bandwidth they actually need.

For example, let’s look at a 1,000-device business network:
🔹 Even with every device online, peak usage will rarely exceed 300 Mbps.
🔹 ISPs push 1 Gbps packages, but businesses almost never come close to using it.
🔹 In reality, a well-managed 300 Mbps connection can handle thousands of users just fine.

💡 More bandwidth isn’t the solution. Smarter bandwidth usage is.


2. The Real Problem | Latency, Not Bandwidth

🚀 Bandwidth determines how much data you can send.
⏳ Latency determines how fast it gets there.

A 100 Mbps connection with 10 ms latency will feel much faster than a 1 Gbps connection with 200 ms latency.

Why Latency Matters for Businesses:

✅ Video Calls & VoIP – High latency = choppy calls, bad audio, and talking over each other.
✅ Cloud Applications – Delays in keystrokes and slow responses from cloud software.
✅ Remote Work & VPNs – Laggy remote desktops and frustrating delays.
✅ Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems – Slow transaction processing.

đź’ˇ Stable, low latency is more important than raw bandwidth. A consistent 20 ms latency is far better than a connection that swings between 5 ms and 300 ms unpredictably.


3. Social Media | The Hidden Bandwidth Hog

If you ran a business network without social media, you could run your business-critical apps on a single LTE link.

🚨 The biggest bandwidth consumption in businesses today? Social media and video streaming. 🚨

Example of typical business bandwidth usage:
🔹 Zoom/Teams Calls: 2–4 Mbps per user
🔹 CRM/ERP Cloud Apps: <1 Mbps per user
🔹 VoIP Calls: ~100 Kbps per call
🔹 Microsoft 365 & Email: <1 Mbps per user
🔹 Social Media & YouTube: 50+ Mbps on a single stream

💡 Solution? Prioritise business traffic and de-prioritise social media. Fusion’s SD-WAN does exactly that with intelligent traffic shaping.


ISPs love to sell massive download speeds (e.g., 200 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up).

But here’s the problem: A congested uplink slows down your downloads, too!

How?

  • Every download requires acknowledgements (ACK packets).

  • If the uplink is full (e.g., from surveillance cameras or backups), the ACK packets get delayed.

  • That delay slows down all downloads, even if you have unused download bandwidth!

đź’ˇ LTE is a disaster for this. It has weak uplinks (often below 5 Mbps), making remote access and cloud-based applications painful.

âś… The Fix? Fusion SD-WAN uses multiple uplinks to avoid congestion and keep latency under control.


Instead of one fat pipe, a business should:
âś” Use multiple connections from different ISPs
âś” Balance traffic across multiple paths
âś” Optimise latency, not just bandwidth
âś” Ensure symmetrical uplink/downlink for stable performance

âś… More Reliable: One link fails? The other takes over.
âś… Better Performance: Traffic spreads across multiple routes.
âś… Lower Latency: Fusion SD-WAN always picks the best-performing link.

💡 Fusion’s SD-WAN does this automatically! It dynamically balances traffic across multiple links, ensuring optimal bandwidth, perfect voice quality, and rock-solid cloud performance.


6. More Network Interfaces = More Traffic Processing Power

A single 1 Gbps connection is limited by the processing ability of one interface.

Multiple 200 Mbps connections across several network interfaces provide higher aggregate performance and better traffic processing.

đź’ˇ Fusion SD-WAN can bond multiple broadband connections together, creating a fast, resilient, and high-performance network that is more effective than a single big connection.


7. The Fusion SD-WAN Advantage | Smart, Not Stupid Bandwidth

Fusion’s SD-WAN is built for businesses that want reliability, not marketing hype.

âś” Multi-link optimisation: Uses multiple connections to ensure seamless performance.
âś” Smart traffic steering: Prioritises business-critical traffic over social media.
âś” Instant failover: If one link drops, traffic moves to another with zero downtime.
âś” Optimised latency: Ensures low and stable latency for cloud apps and VoIP.
✔ Scalability: No need to buy oversized bandwidth—just add more links as needed.


Wrapping Up | Stop Buying the ISP’s Bandwidth Hype

🚨 Your business does NOT need 1 Gbps fibre.
🚨 More bandwidth does NOT mean faster applications.
🚨 Latency and uplink management are more important than raw speed.

đź’ˇ What your business actually needs is Fusion SD-WAN.
âś… More stability, less downtime.
âś… Smarter bandwidth usage, not wasted bandwidth.
âś… A network that prioritises business, not social media.
âś… Seamless, high-quality VoIP and cloud performance.

💡 Instead of buying a 1 Gbps connection that doesn’t solve your problems, deploy Fusion’s SD-WAN and use multiple, smarter connections for a network that actually works.


More information about the use of speedtests:

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Written by

Ronald Bartels
Ronald Bartels

Driving SD-WAN Adoption in South Africa