Bandwidth Capacity Planner

Those three inputs already ask for concurrent, simultaneous users — a video conference participant is by definition on a live call right now — so applying the concurrency percentage on top would double-discount them. General web/email browsing, by contrast, is entered as a total headcount and needs the concurrency rate to estimate how many are actually active during peak.

It walks a fixed ladder of standard circuit sizes (100 Mbps up through 100 Gbps) and picks the smallest one that's still greater than or equal to your total required bandwidth, so utilization is whatever fraction of that tier your total consumes. Because the ladder jumps in large steps (e.g., 1000 to 2500 Mbps), a requirement just over a boundary can land you on a tier where utilization looks conservative — that headroom is a byproduct of standard circuit sizing, not a deliberate safety margin.

It represents packet headers, network management traffic, and burst headroom that ride alongside your actual application traffic regardless of which app generated it, so the calculator sums all four application bandwidths first and then applies one overhead percentage to that combined total rather than duplicating the calculation four times.

The per-application rates (100 kbps per VoIP call, 3 Mbps per video conference, 8 Mbps per HD stream, and your entered web/email rate) are fixed averages, not measurements of your actual codecs, resolutions, or usage patterns — a 4K video stream or a high-fidelity audio codec can use several times the assumed rate. Capture real traffic during a genuinely busy period before finalizing a WAN circuit purchase.