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  "path": "/article/4135595/why-network-bandwidth-matters-a-lot.html",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-02T15:14:51.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.networkworld.com",
  "tags": [
    "Network Management Software, Networking",
    "It’s not all about AI either",
    "overall network plan",
    "SD-WAN",
    "white-box devices",
    "Cisco’s decision to push its new G300 chip"
  ],
  "textContent": "What do enterprises wish for the most when it comes to networking? Ok, if you guessed “that is could be free” you’d be right, but they don’t really think that’s realistic. Their biggest feasible wish is **more capacity**. Networks push bits, and of 372 enterprises who offered comments on their 2026 wishes, 328 put more capacity at the top. It’s not all about AI either. This group thinks that, while there’s no universal cure for network ills, having more capacity comes close. So why is that?\n\nEnterprises have three networks: the data center network, the WAN or VPN, and the LANs that connect workers. To most enterprises, the data center network is the primary focus, likely because that’s where most of their capex is targeted. Two-thirds of enterprises say that their entire networking strategy is based on their data center network, which in turn is based on their hosting platform and application requirements. All the enterprises who commented agreed that the data center network is absolutely critical—a problem there means their overall network plan is in jeopardy.\n\nIn the data center, of the 328 of those who said more capacity was important for their networks, almost half said that they had added capacity in the last two years, and 30% said they planned more increases in 2026. You might expect that AI is the big driver, but it was cited as the top reason by only 11% of the enterprises. What is the top reason to add capacity? To eliminate complaints about quality of experience (QoE).\n\nAlmost 80% of enterprises overall tell me that the most difficult and expensive netops mission is **responding to user complaints about QoE**. That’s not surprising if you think about it, because unlike a real network fault, a QoE complaint doesn’t have an immediate technical symptom to point personnel to a target problem. You have to dig, and because QoE issues are often transient, and are rarely reported immediately, they may be difficult or impossible to diagnose. But there’s a deeper link to capacity, say enterprises.\n\nCongestion and latency, they say, end up being at the heart of over half of reported QoE problems, which means that additional network capacity would likely have prevented them. Not only that, even network faults that result in application performance or availability complaints might be solved with more robust alternate routing options, ones that didn’t result in overloading alternate paths.\n\nBut why focus on the data center when user LAN connections and VPNs are also potential contributors to the problem of QoE? Is it just because, in today’s networks, most capex goes to the data center rather than to LANs and VPNs? Not according to enterprises. Of the 328 users who valued network capacity highly, only a quarter said that they had any issues with VPN or worker-LAN performance. Where such issues exist, they’ve tended to be localized to a small number of workers, a small number of locations. A data center network problem hits everyone, everywhere.\n\nOne interesting point about VPNs is raised by fully a third of capacity-hungry enterprises: SD-WAN is the cheapest and easiest way to increase capacity to remote sites. Yes, service reliability of broadband Internet access for these sites is highly variable, so enterprises say they need to pilot test in a target area to determine whether even business-broadband Internet is reliable enough, but if it is, high capacity is both available and cheap.\n\nClearly data center networking is taking the prime position in enterprise network planning, even without any contribution from AI. Will AI contribute? Enterprises generally believe that self-hosted AI will indeed require more network bandwidth, but again think this will be largely confined to the data center. AI, they say, has a broader and less predictable appetite for data, and business applications involving the data that’s subject to governance, or that’s already data-center hosted, are likely to be hosted proximate to the data. That was true for traditional software, and it’s likely just as true for AI.\n\nYes, but…today, three times as many enterprises say that they’d use AI needs simply to boost justification for capacity expansion as think they currently need it. AI hype has entered, and perhaps even dominates, capital network project justifications.\n\nThese capacity trends don’t impact enterprises alone, they also reshape the equipment space. Only 9% of enterprises say they have invested in white-box devices to build capacity and data center configuration flexibility, but the number that say they would evaluate them in 2026 is double that. This may be what’s behind Cisco’s decision to push its new G300 chip. AI’s role in capital project justifications may also be why Cisco positions the G300 so aggressively as an AI facilitator. Make no mistake, though; this is really all about capacity and QoE, even for AI.",
  "title": "Why network bandwidth matters a lot"
}