Many SME's first connect to the Internet with an inexpensive or cheap ADSL account or iBurst connection and for the first few months the benefits of 24 hours, always on Internet access far outweighs the minimal cost of the connection. Over time though businesses find that their bandwidth usage steadily grows. Before long the bandwidth that they originally had, starts to run out earlier and earlier during the month.

Due to the negligible cost of ADSL, the business starts to increase the cap on their account rather than face the prospects of lost productivity due to slow or non-existent Internet connection. In cases where the business is on a soft-capped ADSL account they may not even upgrade at all leading even higher bandwidth costs as the out-of-bundle rate is much higher than the in-bundle rate.

Bandwidth bills can grow to be a significant cost!

After a year or more the bandwidth bill has slowly grown to a point where it is a significant monthly cost. Most business don't question this growth in the bandwidth bill because

• it has happened incrementally over a relatively long period of time,
• it is assumed that Internet usage grows as the workplace adjusts more and more of its workflow and processes to make use of the Internet,
• it is assumed that since the business has grown so has the Internet usage,
• For some reason people associate the Internet with "free"

Proper IT management processes need to be put in place

Whilst many of these assumptions are true it is a mistake to not question the amount of Internet usage in an organisation. The fact is that SMEs don't know what their bandwidth it being used for because there is no management process in place to monitor utilisation. In some respect the business has become a victim of its own success  in that its IT management practices and infrastructure has not grown with the organisation. Bandwidth costs are something that should be monitored monthly!

Most SMEs rely on the barely acceptable features that come with their ADSL modem for the management of their Internet connection. Unfortunately, whilst this is ok for home users, it is not for a businesses. The first thing business owners should do is to start recording and monitoring usage. The easiest way to do this is to put a cheap, inexpensive firewall in place.

Any decent firewall will provide you with

• detailed break down of bandwidth usage by protocol. Is it it SMTP(mail),HTTP(Web) that is using all the bandwidth or is it something else like peer-to-peer networks like Kazaar or e-mule or maybe a zombie PC spamming the world on behalf of the Russian mafia?
• Allow you to restrict Internet usage to the web and mail only,
• Allow you to prevent inappropriate and bandwidth hogging sites like you-tube and facebook,
• Save bandwidth by acting as a web proxy, i.e caching pages from frequently used sites so they are fetched only once,
• Allow you to assign username and password to staff to enable you to track Internet abusers

Once you start managing the Internet connection rather than just treating it as a unknown you can start to mange the costs associated with it as well. Bear in mind that the costs may not only be increased bandwidth usage fees but also wasted time with employees spending more time responding to facebook friends and arranging their social life than on work.