Forecast 2014: Boost your mobile bandwidth

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and group CEO at Greyhound Research, offers similar warnings about throwing everything on the wireless network. "Wireless is not always the solution," he says. Companies should study usage and then develop an intelligent strategy. For instance, they can segment their networks by categories of users and by type of traffic, which might alleviate bandwidth strain to not only their wireless access points but also their core switches.

The Weber County, Utah, government did just that. Information security officer Matt Mortensen worried that allowing employees to freely use the county's network would eat up bandwidth and jeopardize security. But he had to meet the demands of the county's 1,200 users, half of whom increasingly wanted wireless access for their personal devices.

Mortensen uses firewalls to split the network into separate segments for private and public use. The firewalls are also capable of blocking or throttling bandwidth for productivity-draining applications such as streaming video. While that approach is working today, Mortensen says he fully expects to revisit his strategies as video platforms become integrated into county workflow and more users come onto the public network wanting to do more with their devices.

Gogia says applying intelligence to bandwidth use could buy an organization enough headroom to ward off the need for a major increase. One example of intelligent bandwidth management, he says, is scanning each packet of network traffic to help determine which applications and users require more resources. That approach helps IT maintain more granular control.

Sandra Gittlen