Sitting in front of my computer in my office on the East Coast, I am controlling a robot in Palo Alto, California.

"Push down your up arrow key and follow me," says an employee of Suitable Technologies, the maker of these Beam telepresence robots. I do what I'm told.

The 100-pound Beam is outfitted with wheels, a wide-angle camera, and 17-inch video screen, and I can control it all from an application on my desktop. My keyboard's arrow keys let me drive forward and backward and make turns, while virtual lines superimposed on the ground help me avoid hitting people and objects. Soon enough, I am chatting with Suitable founder and CEO Scott Hassan, who greets me with a fist bump and then sits down on a comfortable-looking chair in the office lounge. Hassan previously founded Willow Garage, which develops hardware and open source software for robotics applications.

"I prefer Beams, talking in Beam... It's much easier to deal with in Beam form," he said. "If we wanted to do this interview, we'd probably do it over the phone or something like that before. With Beam, if I say something to you that's outrageous, I can see your reaction. I can also give you a tour of the place, and you don't have to fly out here."

Videoconferencing that makes you feel almost as if you're in the same room with a person is nothing new, but it's set to become an even greater part of the business world as companies like Suitable take advantage of increasing amounts of Internet bandwidth.

While I spoke with Hassan, the Beam interface informed me I had a 1.4Mbps connection to the system, well above the 500Kbps needed for a good experience. That may not sound like a lot, but imagine a whole conference room filled with people and Beam robots. That's precisely what happened at the recent RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara.

"We just had over 100 people that we didn't know Beam into the convention center and drive these things around," Hassan said.

There's one neat trick that increases Beam's reliability even when it's driving around a large enough area that it has to switch from one Wi-Fi access point to another. The system has two radios, and while one is connected, "the other radio is searching for a better signal," Hassan said. Once it finds a stronger signal, it connects to the new access point and switches the call over in less than a microsecond, he said.

Right now, Beam does just a 480p video stream instead of high definition. Moving to HD would add 200 to 500Kbps to the requirements, Hassan said.

"Our biggest limitation is actually bandwidth—and reliable bandwidth," he said. "It's not too much [on each device], but it all adds up. At the show, at one point we had about 30 Beams simultaneously. We want to support more people simultaneously. If we doubled the bandwidth, then we'd have to double everything."

Business bandwidth boom

The need to collaborate across geographic regions is driving growth in bandwidth requirements. This is often problematic, as we noted in a previous article in this series, "Meeting the bandwidth demands of taking your business into the cloud."

"While on-premises systems can benefit from fast LAN connectivity, with even 10gigE becoming a fixture in the server room and gigabit common elsewhere, cloud services generally have to make do with much scarcer bandwidth resources," we reported. "For small and medium businesses, Internet bandwidth tends to be measured in the megabits, typically dozens, but sometimes in the single digits—especially for branch offices, retail premises, and other small sites.

According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index, global business IP traffic is set to nearly triple between 2012 and 2017 from the increasing use of backup services, VoIP, and just general Internet usage.

Business-related Internet video traffic grew 52 percent in 2012 and will grow 5.3-fold between 2012 and 2017, Cisco predicts. "Video will account for 58 percent of all business Internet traffic in 2017, up from 31 percent in 2012," the company said.

Consumer traffic is rising even faster on the back of streaming video. As a result, business traffic will decline as a proportion of overall traffic from 20 percent in 2012 to 18 percent in 2017, Cisco predicts.

Worldwide, there were 1.41 billion business Internet users and 495 million business mobile users in 2012. Those numbers are expected to grow 6.9 percent and 2.7 percent each year to 1.97 billion and 565 million in 2017, respectively.

How much bandwidth do typical cloud-based business applications require? Cisco separates applications into three tiers: basic, intermediate, and advanced. Each comes with its own bandwidth and latency requirements:

Basic cloud apps Download speed: Up to 750Kbps; Upload Speed: Up to 250Kbps; Latency: Above 160ms

Sample business services: text communications (e-mail, instant messaging), VoIP, Web conferencing Intermediate cloud apps Download speed: 751–2,500Kbps; Upload Speed: 251–1,000Kbps; Latency: 159–100ms

Sample business services: ERP/CRM, IP audio conferencing, video conferencing Advanced cloud apps Download speed: Greater than 2,500Kbps; Upload Speed: Greater than 1,000Kbps; Latency: Less than 100ms

Sample business services: virtual office, HD audio conferencing, HD video conferencing

With all these applications requiring large amounts of bandwidth, managing it all is no easy task. Few companies know this better than Sandvine, which makes equipment that helps consumer broadband providers manage network congestion. Sandvine also publishes "Global Internet Phenomena" research, tracking which applications are driving growth in Internet usage.

Yet even Sandvine has trouble getting enough bandwidth to its own employees. The 500-employee company has engineering offices in Waterloo, Ontario; Jerusalem; and Bangalore, India. The company's teams collaborate on projects using a revision-control system that keeps files synchronized across sites in near-real-time, using Skype for video calls. Those two services "very commonly step on each other's toes," Sandvine co-founder and CTO Don Bowman told Ars. "Somebody checks in a large file, and your conference call breaks up."

As if to demonstrate this problem, my 38-minute call with Bowman was interrupted twice. In one case, the quality dropped for about a minute, and in another case he dropped off entirely and had to dial in again. He happened to be in a hotel room rather than in the office at that point, but he said, "It would be a rare Skype call that wouldn't have a minor hiccup, much like the one we had here."