Hello everyone. I’m the IT Manager for a coworking company out of California. I’m just curious as to what the average internet connection speeds are at most of the coworking spaces in this group. Do you find that your speeds could be faster, but you don’t really have the option to obtain more speed at a decent price? Or are your speeds adequate for your members needs?
How many of you have a dedicated IT person working for your company that you have full access to during the work day? If you don’t, do you have an IT service that you call when things start to work improperly?
Our slowest location has a 50/20mbps copper connection,
but our fastest location is a 300/300mbps Fiber connection.
This is a very interesting topic for me… as the IT guy for Office Nomads. I’ve found that most spaces I talk to do not have a dedicated IT person and struggle when things go wrong. If all you have is your internet provider, or your 14yo cousin, to ask for help, things get dicey really fast. The larger spaces often have the funds for dedicated help and I’ve thought about offering some form of “help desk” option for smaller spaces but haven’t worked out the details in a way that is affordable to most spaces. If you have ideas I’d love to brainstorm and I’d love to hear how it’s working out for you.
Hello everyone. I’m the IT Manager for a coworking company out of California. I’m just curious as to what the average internet connection speeds are at most of the coworking spaces in this group. Do you find that your speeds could be faster, but you don’t really have the option to obtain more speed at a decent price? Or are your speeds adequate for your members needs?
How many of you have a dedicated IT person working for your company that you have full access to during the work day? If you don’t, do you have an IT service that you call when things start to work improperly?
Our slowest location has a 50/20mbps copper connection,
but our fastest location is a 300/300mbps Fiber connection.
We’ve never really needed an IT manager, there’s always been enough talent in-house as coworkers.
I’ve only been involved in smaller coworking spaces, where’s there’s been a lot of client buy-in, but whenever there’s been a problem with the internet, there’s always been someone in the building with the networking knowledge to help sort it out.
In terms of speed; we found that 40 people were ok to share a 20/5mbps connection (we’d do a little policing of power-users/p2p), but things are definitely better with the new 100/100mbps fibre line. The real priority for most people was latency, since we had a number of people using voip on their computers. From my experience, the challenge of having 40 people in a room share an internet connection is the local hardware. You can’t cheap out on your network equipment, particularly your wireless network. This is where 95% of your headaches come from.
At one point, we had our DSL connection fail. Within about 30 minutes (and long before the technician arrived), one of our members had wired up a new connection through the LTE (cellular) network, and everyone was content to share its 5/2mbps connection.
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On Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 12:39:43 PM UTC-5, Jay Smith wrote:
Hello everyone. I’m the IT Manager for a coworking company out of California. I’m just curious as to what the average internet connection speeds are at most of the coworking spaces in this group. Do you find that your speeds could be faster, but you don’t really have the option to obtain more speed at a decent price? Or are your speeds adequate for your members needs?
How many of you have a dedicated IT person working for your company that you have full access to during the work day? If you don’t, do you have an IT service that you call when things start to work improperly?
Our slowest location has a 50/20mbps copper connection,
but our fastest location is a 300/300mbps Fiber connection.
We recently upgraded our connection for 100+ people at www.CoWorkIndia.com (Bangalore, India) to 250/250 mbps fiber. We also upgraded our infrastructure to Cat 6 cables & GBPS switches. I am monitoring the throughput on the gateway and it is usually in the range of 15mbps to 30 mbps for download and less than 5 mbps for upload. Torrents are blocked.
Aaron is right. 95% of headaches come from internal network.
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On Thursday, February 4, 2016 at 10:02:58 PM UTC+5:30, Aaron Mader wrote:
We’ve never really needed an IT manager, there’s always been enough talent in-house as coworkers.
I’ve only been involved in smaller coworking spaces, where’s there’s been a lot of client buy-in, but whenever there’s been a problem with the internet, there’s always been someone in the building with the networking knowledge to help sort it out.
In terms of speed; we found that 40 people were ok to share a 20/5mbps connection (we’d do a little policing of power-users/p2p), but things are definitely better with the new 100/100mbps fibre line. The real priority for most people was latency, since we had a number of people using voip on their computers. From my experience, the challenge of having 40 people in a room share an internet connection is the local hardware. You can’t cheap out on your network equipment, particularly your wireless network. This is where 95% of your headaches come from.
At one point, we had our DSL connection fail. Within about 30 minutes (and long before the technician arrived), one of our members had wired up a new connection through the LTE (cellular) network, and everyone was content to share its 5/2mbps connection.
On Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 12:39:43 PM UTC-5, Jay Smith wrote:
Hello everyone. I’m the IT Manager for a coworking company out of California. I’m just curious as to what the average internet connection speeds are at most of the coworking spaces in this group. Do you find that your speeds could be faster, but you don’t really have the option to obtain more speed at a decent price? Or are your speeds adequate for your members needs?
How many of you have a dedicated IT person working for your company that you have full access to during the work day? If you don’t, do you have an IT service that you call when things start to work improperly?
Our slowest location has a 50/20mbps copper connection,
but our fastest location is a 300/300mbps Fiber connection.
We are a coworking space of 50 people at each location and find Comcast Business 80/20 mbps to be completely adequate. We upgraded the wireless routers and things are very smooth. We did have a backup 40 mbps DSL connection but found it to be unnecessary after 2 years of having it and recently cancelled it.
I did add a new smart QoS switch to our internal network and I’m indifferent right now about it because if several people are using VoIP with video conference then things will go slow for everyone else. I think it might be a switch setting that could be fixed because it jump onto a different router behind the switch then I will still get a really fast speed.
Basically, 80/20 seems good for our space and the price is right for around $150.