Scantlings

We have a bandwidth problem here at work. According to our IT guy we are at the "end of the line" and the ISP will not upgrade the infrastructure so we can have high bandwidth service and we are not willing to spend the money to upgrade it ourselves if we could. This has resulted in the banning of any streaming services. So I cannot get video tutorials when I nned to and cannot research vendors, etc who use videos to demo their products, etc, etc. There ar certain times of the day the front office needs a s much bandwidth as possible but other times it is fairly free. Is there software out there which can sense bandwidth drops and block streaming when it gets low or blocks it at certain times of the day? I am just a dumb yacht designer but you tech guys out there know way more about this than I do. Anything out there?

I believe this is called 'throttling'. It would be controlled by your router or firewall or whatever you want to call it. Whoever manages that device for you guys should be able to configure it.

Joe,

No idea of the cost for a business connection, but has your IT guy looked at satellite internet for additional bandwidth? Physics make it tough to do VoIP or other truly interactive work due to excessive latency (just the time for the signal to go to and from the sat causes some 600 ms of latency). For just downloading, you could probably deal with 750-1000 ms latency. You would see a delay from asking a video to run to the time it starts but with enough bandwidth, you shouldn't see much buffering.

The technology you want is called Quality of Service (QoS). It's a mechanism of organizing traffic into various classes with low-priority traffic (like streaming) throttled when higher priority traffic needs to get through.

Thanks you guys! I have passed this on to the It guy.