Wireless Connectivity

Re: Working with Limited Internet Access

Rog — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:58:54 GMT

My solution is usually a variation of the following:

Throttle the hell out of the network. I'm the worst offender when it comes to torrents, but I penalize that traffic and put it at the absolute bottom of the totem pole. Or, better yet, allow http traffic *first* and then allow the rest.
Drop in a box like ntop to give some sort of visibility as to who the bandwidth hogs are
Put in caching solutions (application, server, etc)
Aggregating WLAN lines

Interestingly, pfsense has all of these options, which should put it on the short list for non-profits that have this problem.

Re: Working with Limited Internet Access

MeganKeane — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:39:02 GMT

We run into internet problems quite often in our Second Life, Nonprofit Commons project. Second Life is very resource-intensive and sucks up a lot of bandwidth. Additionally users have to be running a fairly recent video card just to be able to load the Second Life standard client.

On this thread, users shared some tips for reducing lag with Second Life. However having a robust web Second Life client is the direction many have been pushing Linden Lab (company behind Second Life) to develop.

Re: Working with Limited Internet Access

dwelp — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:16:07 GMT

With sites that connect with limited amount of bandwidth here are a few things I've used.

Down load service packs and software updates from an area with good unlimited Internet access to flash drives and use that to update machines on the sties with limited access.

Let the users at the site self police internet usage, once they understand that their Internet surfing impacts everyone else, they tend to self regulate each other.

I let the site management decide if they want better Internet access. Every time they've complained about the speed, I tell them the monthly cost to speed them up and they say the current access is just fine.

Use AV clients that use small update files instead of the multi megabyte files with each update.

Teach users not to send huge email attachments.

Be careful not to jump on the ASP band wagon when your infrastructure will not support the needs of externally hosted apps.

Dave

Working with Limited Internet Access

elliotharmon — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:48:27 GMT

Today on the TechSoup Blog, we discussed tips for working with a slow or limited Internet connection.

What's your secret to keeping your bandwidth usage down?

Cheers,
Elliot