Don't be a bandwidth hog

Last week, I met up with a client who was working onsite at one of their client's networks.   Halfway through my visit, the IT Admin of the network popped his head into the conference room we were using to ask us if we were uploading large amounts of data.   Their normally high-speed internet connection was running extremely slowly.

We had been downloading data, but not aware of any uploading.   After taking a closer look at my client's computer, I noticed that it was running Carbonite, an in-the-cloud backup service.  The Carbonite software was set to continuously backup the data on her computer.  In this case, after we were finished downloading the large files we were working with, Carbonite was busy uploading them for safe keeping.  All the time, it was using quite a substantial bit of the bandwidth, which made for one unhappy IT Guy.

Later that week, I was at a client's network that has very limited bandwidth to begin with.   They are in a location that is only serviced by T1 lines and they max out at 6 Mbps.   They were holding an annual conference and using some video conferencing technology to allow a few remote people to attend their conference.   The remote users could not get the video portion of the conference to work and were left with audio only.   I took a look at the bandwidth and half of it was being used up by something unknown.   After trekking around the building, I stumbled upon a guest on the network that was streaming Pandora Radio on their laptop.  I kindly asked them to turn off the Pandora and when they did the bandwidth was restored and the remote conference users were able to get their video connection to display.

At most networks, there is never enough bandwidth.  If you are a guest on a network, you might want to make sure to turn off your applications that use up a lot of bandwidth to avoid being a bandwidth hog.  Especially, if you don't need to be using them while on-site.   Basically, any program that streams music, video, uploads or downloads files will use bandwidth and create a grumpier than usual IT Guy.   You don't want that.