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This doesn't make sense to me. Unless "small business" actually means a firm that uses an internal video link for many dozens of people, I would think that smal
by lordnacho 6y ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Unless "small business" actually means a firm that uses an internal video link for many dozens of people, I would think that small businesses are actually overprovisioned. Consider that you could easily support several people watching youtube or similar streaming media at the same time.
Suppose you have a small firm with 10 office workers. They're doing what? Downloading excel spreadsheets or word documents, working on them, then uploading them. For that they have a 20-50Mps line. It might be asymmetric, but chances are that it's still fast enough to get most documents very quickly, and your 10 staff will barely ever be using the line at the same time.
Even remote desktop sessions are not all that bandwidth hungry, and chances are if you're doing vidconf, you are using the provider's infrastructure, eg zoom.
IMO if you're a small business your problem is more that you don't have anyone who knows how to configure the router, you might have lax security, and your infrastructure is brittle (net goes down, no fallback).
That's what I'd focus on rather than VPN capacity.
- t0mas88 6y agoFrom practical experience before we moved everything to "the cloud" and emptied the office server rack: These small businesses have a Windows server in a closet somewhere with huge amounts of files on it, typically a users complete documents folder etc. When the user is in the office, they have a 1gbit LAN connection to that server and everything is great. Now 20 people work remote and all those files are behind a shared 20mbit uplink from the office to the internet. So the problem isn't only people watching YouTube or the fact that they VPN through the office to get online, it's also that all the files are still in the office.
- lordnacho 6y agoI've been in those kinds of offices too, before the great cloud switchover. What kind of usage would result in high upload volumes? How big is your average Excel, Word or Powerpoint? In my experience, it's not enough to touch the sides. The only time there was ever a problem was when we bought a huge dataset to run quant strategies on, but that's not your usual office workload?
- dijit 6y agonot to be a party pooper, but I've seen excel files in the multiple gigabytes thrown around. Excel is actually one of the better tools ironically; I've seen powerpoint that make me genuinely sad for the state of computing.
- t0mas88 6y agoExcel can be huge (think: all orders from a long time frame) but PowerPoint is also famous with lots of pictures or embedded video.