[Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
From home connections to gigabit, everything goes. Make sure that you can upgrade easily -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
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.contract...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','bartolomei.contract...@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 -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
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 phone: 778.908.4560 e-mail: aa...@cruikshank.me web: cruikshank.me http://www.cruikshank.me twitter: @cruikshank https://twitter.com/cruikshank book a meeting: doodle.com/cruikshank http://www.doodle.com/cruikshank linkedin: in/cruikshank http://www.linkedin.com/in/cruikshank On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Jacob Sayles ja...@officenomads.com wrote: Also on the DHCP front we switched to using a netmask of 23 instead of 24 to get twice the number of addresses. On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: Yeah, dropped it down to a day from 7 and our helped. (Secretly looking for an excuse to buy better kit anyway! ) On 2 Apr 2015 18:29, Glen Ferguson g...@coworkfrederick.com wrote: 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* Phone: 301-732-5165 Email: g...@coworkfrederick.com http://mailtog...@coworkfrederick.com Website: http://coworkfrederick.com Address: 122 E Patrick St, Frederick, MD 21701 On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com wrote: 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 Or this single unit: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Enterprise-System-AP-Pro-UAP-PRO/dp/B00HXT8T5O/ref=pd_sim_pc_6?ie=UTF8refRID=1SYSFCBY9V4T4H5TW0P1 -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: +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
Re: [Coworking] What metrics do you all gauge to decide whether a location will work well for a coworking space?
Yeah, big +1 to that. We have done some research into the reasons people join and stay, and location/proximity are consistently WAY lower on the top 10 list than anybody expects. That data (and more) can be found in this synthesis: http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/alexknowshtml/quantifying-community-how-we-measure-success-in-a-coworking-space I also had a couple of academic researchers on my podcast recently who found that things like proximity are far less indicators of people choosing coworking, since the people who choose it generally have workspace alternatives that are closer than the one they end up joining and paying for. Location matters, but it matters a lot less than you might think if you're actually solving a problem for people. -Alex On Thursday, April 2, 2015, Andy Soell aso...@gmail.com wrote: I know this isn't exactly what you're asking, but Alex's post reminded me of one of the most interesting and unexpected things I've found since we opened our space nearly 3 years ago. I expected that we would have around 80% of our members coming from the immediate neighborhood, but I've found that people are more than willing to commute if the place they're commuting to is a place they enjoy working. I just took a quick scan of our member roster and less than a quarter of our members live in what I would consider the neighborhood of either of our spaces. Several of those 25% are in the neighborhood because they've specifically moved here after joining us, which is even more incredible. So yeah, it's not necessarily about proximity as much as what you're offering and the kind of community you're cultivating. On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 9:44:02 PM UTC-4, Alex Hillman wrote: How many people are in a radius doesn't really matter, if none of those people care about or need Coworking. We did something counterintuitive when we began: we put Indy Hall in a place where NONE of our community members already were. We chose a neighborhood that was easily accessible my public transit (something important to our community), but all of our early members lived in 3 main parts of the city and we chose to open in an area that was relatively central to all 3. If we had picked any one of those three parts, the other 2/3rds of our community would've felt more disconnected. Bur I say relative because that's important. There is ALWAYS someone who will say that you're too far away. In our case, that can be as far away as 4 subway stops. It depends on what people are used to. All of this stems from answering a bigger question and asking: who are your members? Not a demographic, or people you hope to reach...but who are the ACTUAL people that you CAN reach. Where are they, and where do they already go? Do they cross neighborhoods? How do they get there? What kind of work do they do? Can they work from anywhere? Do they have the power to choose where they work? Do they like the way they work, or is there a problem or set of problems? I'm a HUGE supporter of doing pop-up Coworking (aka Jelly, workatjelly.com) for a while before selecting any space because it's the ideal way of seeing who actually shows up, and where, and most importantly WHY. Is it because they need a place to work? Or...is it because they're lonely at home and cafes are awkward to be a professional. And you can find all of that our before ever wasting time on finding the perfect location (which doesn't exist, that's a fantasy) and without spending a dollar, unsure if you'll ever see that dollar again. -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://listen.coworkingweekly.com On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Cassidy bartolomei.contract...@gmail.com wrote: What metrics do you all gauge to decide whether a location will work? Like, - at least 100,000 people in a 5 mile radius - at least 100,000 small businesses in a 5 mile radius etc. Thanks! Cassidy -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','coworking%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com'); . For more options, visit
Re: [Coworking] What metrics do you all gauge to decide whether a location will work well for a coworking space?
I know this isn't exactly what you're asking, but Alex's post reminded me of one of the most interesting and unexpected things I've found since we opened our space nearly 3 years ago. I expected that we would have around 80% of our members coming from the immediate neighborhood, but I've found that people are more than willing to commute if the place they're commuting to is a place they enjoy working. I just took a quick scan of our member roster and less than a quarter of our members live in what I would consider the neighborhood of either of our spaces. Several of those 25% are in the neighborhood because they've specifically moved here after joining us, which is even more incredible. So yeah, it's not necessarily about proximity as much as what you're offering and the kind of community you're cultivating. On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 9:44:02 PM UTC-4, Alex Hillman wrote: How many people are in a radius doesn't really matter, if none of those people care about or need Coworking. We did something counterintuitive when we began: we put Indy Hall in a place where NONE of our community members already were. We chose a neighborhood that was easily accessible my public transit (something important to our community), but all of our early members lived in 3 main parts of the city and we chose to open in an area that was relatively central to all 3. If we had picked any one of those three parts, the other 2/3rds of our community would've felt more disconnected. Bur I say relative because that's important. There is ALWAYS someone who will say that you're too far away. In our case, that can be as far away as 4 subway stops. It depends on what people are used to. All of this stems from answering a bigger question and asking: who are your members? Not a demographic, or people you hope to reach...but who are the ACTUAL people that you CAN reach. Where are they, and where do they already go? Do they cross neighborhoods? How do they get there? What kind of work do they do? Can they work from anywhere? Do they have the power to choose where they work? Do they like the way they work, or is there a problem or set of problems? I'm a HUGE supporter of doing pop-up Coworking (aka Jelly, workatjelly.com) for a while before selecting any space because it's the ideal way of seeing who actually shows up, and where, and most importantly WHY. Is it because they need a place to work? Or...is it because they're lonely at home and cafes are awkward to be a professional. And you can find all of that our before ever wasting time on finding the perfect location (which doesn't exist, that's a fantasy) and without spending a dollar, unsure if you'll ever see that dollar again. -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://listen.coworkingweekly.com On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Cassidy bartolomei.contract...@gmail.com wrote: What metrics do you all gauge to decide whether a location will work? Like, - at least 100,000 people in a 5 mile radius - at least 100,000 small businesses in a 5 mile radius etc. Thanks! Cassidy -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
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* Phone: 301-732-5165 Email: g...@coworkfrederick.com mailtog...@coworkfrederick.com Website: http://coworkfrederick.com Address: 122 E Patrick St, Frederick, MD 21701 On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com wrote: 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 Or this single unit: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Enterprise-System-AP-Pro-UAP-PRO/dp/B00HXT8T5O/ref=pd_sim_pc_6?ie=UTF8refRID=1SYSFCBY9V4T4H5TW0P1 -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: +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.contract...@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 -- Visit this forum on the web at
Re: [Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
+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.contract...@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 -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
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 Or this single unit: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Enterprise-System-AP-Pro-UAP-PRO/dp/B00HXT8T5O/ref=pd_sim_pc_6?ie=UTF8refRID=1SYSFCBY9V4T4H5TW0P1 -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: +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.contract...@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 -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.*
Re: [Coworking] Bandwidth questions for new coworking venture
Also on the DHCP front we switched to using a netmask of 23 instead of 24 to get twice the number of addresses. On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: Yeah, dropped it down to a day from 7 and our helped. (Secretly looking for an excuse to buy better kit anyway! ) On 2 Apr 2015 18:29, Glen Ferguson g...@coworkfrederick.com wrote: 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* Phone: 301-732-5165 Email: g...@coworkfrederick.com http://mailtog...@coworkfrederick.com Website: http://coworkfrederick.com Address: 122 E Patrick St, Frederick, MD 21701 On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com wrote: 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 Or this single unit: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Enterprise-System-AP-Pro-UAP-PRO/dp/B00HXT8T5O/ref=pd_sim_pc_6?ie=UTF8refRID=1SYSFCBY9V4T4H5TW0P1 -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Stuart Lambert stu...@cohub.co.uk wrote: +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
