Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture

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Cassidy

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Apr 1, 2015, 9:31:44 PM4/1/15
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Hi everyone!

do you recommend any websites or databases for researching average data consumption by industry and/or company size?

or do you have any insights to share regarding how your ventures provide internet services?

thanks :) 

Cassidy

Ramon Suarez

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Apr 2, 2015, 3:26:14 AM4/2/15
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From home connections to gigabit, everything goes. Make sure that you can upgrade easily

Alex Hillman

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Apr 2, 2015, 9:02:24 AM4/2/15
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I've never seen a resource that organizes bandwidth usage that way - even within our individual respective spaces I think that would be tricky data to acquire! 

But two things that aren't obvious about Internet usage (and how bandwidth is just a tiny part of the equation) until you've had hundreds of people piping through a shared connection every day:

1) bandwidth is important, but latency is more important. Without getting super duper technical, latency is the speed that the network responds, which is different from how fast files download. 

MOST people spend a lot of their day clicking around the Internet, or using internet connected apps. With some rare exceptions like game developers and video editors, the files we move around in our daily work are relatively small. 

But when the latency is bad - everyone feels it because clicking to load a page, or refresh email, or live typing on Google docs etc feels like it has a lag. Our network (internal wireless + gigabit) plus our 50mb down/10mb up almost always has more than enough bandwidth for 120+ people working hard every day. And that includes streaming videos, music, etc. 

Where things go haywire is when latency ratchets up. This can happen in our network because wifi coverage is interrupted, or because our internet provider is having issues, or most often because someone on the network is uploading a huge file (offsite backup like a Dropbox sync or uploading a video to YouTube) and our ISP starts to throttle latency because it thinks something is wrong. This tool is FOREVER to figure out!

Our normal network latency is 20-30ms response time from a popular site like google.com when it goes above 100ms, you start to notice things slowing down. 200ms and the network feels like it's crawling. Interestingly, though, you can still download big files quickly they just take a few extra moments before they start. 

It's a rough experience to explain to people, and they don't care if it's latency or speed they just want to work. So understanding that more speed without an improvement in latency is important. 

2) the network itself is just as important as the Internet connection. There's been a bunch of great discussions on this list about network design and what hardware to get before, but Jon Markwell's post sums up the majority of the best of it: http://jonathanmarkwell.com/2014/11/22/best-coworking-wifi/

We upgraded to the Unifi system that he mentions in this post and it's been a MASSIVE improvement over everything else we tried. I heartily endorse this recommendation now from first hand experience!

-Alex
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Stuart Lambert

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Apr 2, 2015, 12:28:54 PM4/2/15
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+1 to the Unifi recommendation.

We found that the dual band versions work far better. It seems a lot of users in the building our space shares are using 2.4Ghz only routers so we have the 5Ghz band to ourself...

Something we've bumped into very recently is exhausting the DHCP pool on our router (a Draytek) which only supports 254 DHCP total address, no matter what size subnet you configure. The symptoms are people being unable to connect to the network because there is no spare DHCP address for them. We have one of these on order which will fix this issue, and provide us with better throughput from our network to the internet - http://linitx.com/product/linitx-apu-1d-3nicusbrtc-pfsense-embed-firewall-kit-red/14094


On Thursday, 2 April 2015 14:02:24 UTC+1, Alex Hillman wrote:
I've never seen a resource that organizes bandwidth usage that way - even within our individual respective spaces I think that would be tricky data to acquire! 

But two things that aren't obvious about Internet usage (and how bandwidth is just a tiny part of the equation) until you've had hundreds of people piping through a shared connection every day:

1) bandwidth is important, but latency is more important. Without getting super duper technical, latency is the speed that the network responds, which is different from how fast files download. 

MOST people spend a lot of their day clicking around the Internet, or using internet connected apps. With some rare exceptions like game developers and video editors, the files we move around in our daily work are relatively small. 

But when the latency is bad - everyone feels it because clicking to load a page, or refresh email, or live typing on Google docs etc feels like it has a lag. Our network (internal wireless + gigabit) plus our 50mb down/10mb up almost always has more than enough bandwidth for 120+ people working hard every day. And that includes streaming videos, music, etc. 

Where things go haywire is when latency ratchets up. This can happen in our network because wifi coverage is interrupted, or because our internet provider is having issues, or most often because someone on the network is uploading a huge file (offsite backup like a Dropbox sync or uploading a video to YouTube) and our ISP starts to throttle latency because it thinks something is wrong. This tool is FOREVER to figure out!

Our normal network latency is 20-30ms response time from a popular site like google.com when it goes above 100ms, you start to notice things slowing down. 200ms and the network feels like it's crawling. Interestingly, though, you can still download big files quickly they just take a few extra moments before they start. 

It's a rough experience to explain to people, and they don't care if it's latency or speed they just want to work. So understanding that more speed without an improvement in latency is important. 

2) the network itself is just as important as the Internet connection. There's been a bunch of great discussions on this list about network design and what hardware to get before, but Jon Markwell's post sums up the majority of the best of it: http://jonathanmarkwell.com/2014/11/22/best-coworking-wifi/

We upgraded to the Unifi system that he mentions in this post and it's been a MASSIVE improvement over everything else we tried. I heartily endorse this recommendation now from first hand experience!

-Alex

On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Cassidy <bartolomei.contracting@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everyone!

do you recommend any websites or databases for researching average data consumption by industry and/or company size?

or do you have any insights to share regarding how your ventures provide internet services?

thanks :) 

Cassidy

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Alex Hillman

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Apr 2, 2015, 12:41:30 PM4/2/15
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Oh yeah my experience matches Stuart's, the dual band is much better. 

I thought we could get away with the single band $99-per-unit versions when we expanded our initial cover and...yeah, they're just not as good. 

Definitely spring for the Pro units - this 3 pack: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-Enterprise-System-UAP-PRO-3/dp/B00DJERLFG 



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Glen Ferguson

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Apr 2, 2015, 1:29:08 PM4/2/15
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If you shorten the DHCP lease time to 2, 4, or even 8 hours, that should address the problem of running  out of leases.

Glen Ferguson  
Address: 122 E Patrick St, Frederick, MD 21701

Stuart Lambert

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Apr 2, 2015, 2:11:52 PM4/2/15
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Yeah, dropped it down to a day from 7 and our helped.

(Secretly looking for an excuse to buy better kit anyway! )

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Jacob Sayles

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Apr 2, 2015, 2:29:01 PM4/2/15
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Also on the DHCP front we switched to using a netmask of 23 instead of 24 to get twice the number of addresses.

Aaron Cruikshank

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Apr 2, 2015, 2:59:10 PM4/2/15
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We found that the upload speed was an important consideration if you have a lot of people in your space doing video conferencing via Skype, Google Hangouts, etc...
At the HiVE, we were on a coax cable internet plan and the upload speed was 1 MB/s. It used to brown out the internet for everyone if more than two people tried to do video calling at the same time. When we switched to fibre, we were then getting 100 MB/s up and the brownout problem went away.

Aaron Cruikshank
Principal, CRUIKSHANK
twitter: @cruikshank
book a meeting: doodle.com/cruikshank
linkedin: in/cruikshank



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