Tag: bandwidth

This post was originally written in 2011. I removed this post as I was an employee of Universal Parks & Resorts Creative, a subsidiary of Comcast from March 5, 2018 until November 6, 2020. This issue still remained an issue as I left the office.

Bradford
November 6, 2020

As my faithful Twitter reader knows, I have been having some issues with my computer attaching to the network at the office. It has been Outlook locking me out, Windows Domain Server locking me out, IT (Information Technology) changing the network configuration, entire system going down… etc. Some of these issues were due to the configuration changes that IT is making, some were unforeseen, some were just plain dumb luck.

Something that surprises me though is that for how much we like to cast aspersion on IT; sometimes we are our own worst enemy. By we, I mean the users. Not just at my company but pretty much everywhere IT has a love hate relationship with the users, the users love to hate IT. I am not saying that IT is beyond reproach, but some of the decisions we make, often times it makes it worse for everyone.

One of the most common complaints I am hearing is about the speed of the Internet. The next common complaint is the fact that many IT departments limit the streaming or some of the social network options. These concerns and complaints are all interrelated and is a case of size.

Many offices are connected with a T1 connection, which sounds “fast” but in reality it is not so much. The standard is that a T1 is 1.544 Mbps (megabits per second). The typical upper limit on residential DSL is 3 Mbps. Cable is much faster with an upper limit of 30 Mbps. Based on that it is easy to see why people often say, “The Internet is much faster at home.” Of course the first comment is why not just bring in something other than a T1? Yes, it is possible but for most business they are looking at uptimes and guaranteed bandwidth. Most contracts with a T1 or similar service state you will have a level of uptime or availability as well as guaranteed minimum speeds.

Most residential broadband services rate the speed as “up to 22Mbps” or something similar. They also typically do not have a guarantee on your uptime or availability. The Comcast Guarantee does not have a guarantee for availability or speed; the Residential Agreement also does not have a speed or availability commitment, the only credits occur after a 24 hour continuous outage. The business agreement has the same issue of lacking performance commitments.

So if I were running a business would I rely on a connection that might be non functioning for a day with no speed minimum, or would I rather have a higher availability and slower speed? I would take the one with a real service level agreement of what bandwidth and connectivity will be delivered.

The next item that impacts the speed is the amount of people using that connection to the Internet. At your house where you might have speeds up to ten times faster, you will typically have no more than four people using the connection at the same time. Now compare that to a business environment, forty people sharing a connection would not be unheard of would it? Not only is it less bandwidth but more people are using it

So if there are 40 people sharing a 1.544 Mbps or 1,554 kbps connection, let’s divide it equally. It is now each person getting 38.6 kbps. Remember dial up modems at 33.6 kbps? Now one user decides to stream a video, the typical bandwidth options are 300 kbps, 500 kbps, or 700kbps. If the user decides to stream the video at 700kbps they have effectively used half of the entire T1, okay it is only 45% but don’t forget the rest of the content on the page. So now because of one person everyone is experiencing delivered speed that can be slower than a dial up modem. Remember the bandwidth is shared for everyone.

Yes, the same thing happens in hotels, coffee houses, airport lounges … etc. bandwidth is shared.

So if I was responsible for productivity and availability of the Internet at a business, what is the first thing I would do? Turn off streaming. Why? It is a bandwidth hog and there are typically more important things to use the bandwidth on that will directly impact staying in business.

Yes, I still think that many IT departments make decisions that are not helpful to the end-users. Yes, I think that the help desk often doesn’t. I just want to point out that we as the users are sometimes the problem. Please, before you decide to fire up Pandora or Slacker, or surf YouTube think about if you are slowing down others? Don’t be a bandwidth hog.

My solution? I take lunch after most people and stay later than most. Why? Since everyone has left for lunch or for home, I get better bandwidth. I also listen to music using my iPod.

Another airplane flight, another blog post. This one is about the “new modes” of audio delivery. As many of my readers know I work in the audio industry, I do not often blog about it as I am concerned about the impact my comments could have. Not that I would get in trouble with my employer, heck I was looking for a job when I got this one; but more that people would take my comments and opinions as if I was speaking for my employer. So let my blog, my domain, my opinions, written in my nonworking hours and me unequivocally state that these are my personal thoughts and opinions.

The new mode of delivery I am thinking of is digital distribution of audio products. I purchase music as a digital format less often than most people think. The reason is that most delivery methods are compressed. I believe that compression should be applied judiciously. Not all compression is bad, as I sit listening to music on my iPod on a plane. I decided the quality of music is the item I want for this application.

That is the key; the application is that I want to travel with a large selection of music. It does not have to be pristine as the listening environment is less than pristine. I do however want for airplane flights and time in hotels to be able to have music. I do not always know what kind of music I am going to want to listen to three days from now. I would rather have the selection at a compression ratio that I find appropriate.

I am purposefully omitting numbers, as too often when numbers are listed it becomes a contest by numbers, such as one saying that they will only listen to music at 96kHz sample rate. When I ask why, the answer is often well it is a higher number it must be better. I wonder if that person would be able to tell the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz recordings in the listening conditions I am currently in; a tin can traveling through the air at 300mph with an internal ambient noise of 70dB SPL A weighted through noise canceling ear buds. Probably not so easily, I am not going to say it is impossible; I am going to say it is improbable. I believe and can hear that there is a difference between sample rates in other environments.

At the same time, other listening environments that are acceptable applications for compressed audio for some people are not for me. In my car I have CDs loaded in the changer and a smaller election of non-compressed audio files on the attached iPod. In that environment I can hear a difference between the full quality and the compressed audio. I do not listen to satellite radio music channels in the car often as that compression annoys me and I can hear it. For other people they do not find it objectionable.

The key is that I am deciding. I can control how much compression and the amount of data that is important and acceptable to me. Often buying audio products as digital downloads that decision is someone else’s and I might not agree with it. Paying 99 cents for a compressed piece of music that is just for “fun” can make sense. Paying $15 for a digital download of a CD that is compressed as 11 separate songs versus buying the CD for $15 is something I will not do.
Why you may ask? I have done it, and I have regretted spending the money. The digital download has some audio artifacts that the CD does not. I then can also decide if I want to compress the audio to put it in another format. Not only that, I get to decide the compression protocol as MPEG3 is not always the best. If more people had uncompressed delivery methods I would buy more audio via digital distribution.

The key is to use the best test equipment that we have, our ears, to make the decision for yourself. The way I approach it, is your source should be as ideal as possible and then you have the control to decide what is acceptable compression tradeoffs.

Also please remember that one answer is not the right answer for everyone. The amount of compression that I find objectionable might be perfectly acceptable to someone else. So don’t turn your nose up and ruin other people’s enjoyment just because it doesn’t meet your standards. If people are having fun or the message is getting across isn’t the most important parts of audio being accomplished.

And yes my photographer friends the same thing can be said about JPEG compression. I start with RAW and then I decide how to impact the image as I process it to JPEG or other formats.

So I use SmugMug to host my photos as they have some really cool features and people there. I also started following a few of them on Twitter, and there was a tweet that just made my head hurt, so I sat down to do the math on it. Okay, I also used Wolfram Alpha to help with it.

The Tweet from Baldy stated:

“Whoa! Vincent LaForet‘s new Canon Mark IV vid on SmugMug used over 20 terabytes of bandwidth in 300,000 views in 14 hours.”

So I started to try and figure out how many megabits/second that was so I could compare it to typical network connectivity that I am more familiar with, 100BaseT or Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet. Well it just became amazing.

  • First I converted 20TB to megabits
    • 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =  160,000,000 megabits.
      Yes, that is 160 Billion megabits
  • The next thing was to convert hours to seconds
    • 14 hours = 840 minutes = 50,400 seconds
  • Now to convert to megabits/second
    • 160,000,000 megabits/50,400 seconds = 3,174 megabits/second = 3.2 gigabits/second.

So that is pretty freaking fast at to how quickly the data is coming out.

Wolfram Alpha had cool comparisons to put it in context. It is approximately equal to the text content of the Library of Congress. It is approximately equal to 1/8th of the  estimated data content of the surface web (~~ 170 TB ).

Dang no wonder they are in need of 2 TB  of flash memory for a server. You can see the picture and Don MacAskill CEO of SmugMug here http://bit.ly/3HlXzH