Calculating Bandwidth for your WAN [Video]

There was an interesting discussion over in one of the Cisco forums on how to calculate your WAN speed. Those of you who read my last post know that packet loss, latency, and bandwidth all play into throughput calculations.

But that still doesn’t tell you how much to dimension your network if you’re replicating or backing up a database or running interactive traffic. One poster, JosephDoherty, had some great insight that I thought you might like:

“For bulk transfers, you calculate how much data needs to be transferred in how much time. For example, if we had a database backup of 10 GB, and a time window of 5 hours (e.g. midnight to 5 AM), you need to transfer 2 GB an hour or about 4.5 Kbps. (An actual production calculation would need to allow for how the protocol works, so for example if using TCP, you might need to allow …