Once upon a time, Daniel Roesen <dr@cluenet.de> said:
That reminds me of 9/11. When the tragic event unfolded, we sat in the office. News made the rounds verbally, and people started looking for streaming services at their personal desks (no TVs around). People pretty quickly gave up trying to find streams and news portals which were actually working fine and the crowd gathering behind me watching over my shoulder became bigger and bigger.
We had a TV in the office then, but now we don't. The other big news event of the week, the tornadoes in the south (especially here in Alabama), meant we were filling up our office bandwidth much of the day Wednesday, watching the local weathermen to find out if we (or our family and friends) were next. This was an exceedingly unusual event in terms of magnitude, but the watching to see where the tornadoes go part is fairly regular around here this time of year. Every time there is a severe weather outbreak, we see our bandwidth usage go up significantly (especially when it is during the business day). As an admin at a small ISP, I'll admit we don't have multicast set up in our network, in part because every time I've looked, I just end up confused. Kind of like IPv6 was for a long time, except IPv6 has more attention and so more people writing better (easier to understand) info. Of course, we provide DSL via PPPoE (wholesaler, so we don't have a choice in the setup), so there isn't much we can do to help with that level. That's where we could gain the most of course; we sometimes see nearly double the DSL traffic for big events (not for the wedding though, since most of our customers don't have electricity). The "last mile" is usually the bottleneck, but that's the hardest nut to crack. -- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.