Working from abroad – the low bandwidth problem

Here’s a slightly techie article.

We’re normally almost oblivious to the demands we make on an internet connection or a local area network when out of our home environments. Even in the most well-equipped home, where each occupant has a mobile and a computer (say, eight devices in total?) the actual bandwidth utilisation can be quite low in the case of normal surfing. Firstly, the mobiles might be connecting by 3G over the cellular network some of the time: we can subtract that activity from the home network equation. Secondly, normal surfing comprises a tiny request for some data sent upstream to a server which responds by sending a large quantity of data downstream. For that reason, ADSL, the most commonly deployed basic internet connection I’ve encountered, offers much more downstream bandwidth than upstream. Thirdly, usage can be easily moderated by off-line family communication: If the net “feels” slow, you can ask around and find out who is downloading a movie or streaming from BBC iPlayer, negotiate and come to an acceptable agreement on who consumes what capacity when.

Now take an independent hotel or hostel. The hardware might be similar or identical to the setup of the home due to the familiarity of such hardware to whoever was charged with “setting up the internet” so it is unlikely to have the corporate QoS features and cooling which will make it more suitable for heavy, reliable use. Almost all the occupants are away from their low-cost cellular connections, so they must use the local wi-fi. In some cases, the more technically able might use analogues of the cellular services they are used to like Skype and other VoIP services which are higher bandwidth consuming applications – this is unlikely in the home, where a switched cell or landline call takes that traffic away from the network. Whilst residents may be willing to talk to each other, the social dynamics make observations about the internet usage of another resident largely off-limits. There are other high-bandwidth applications, some of them strongly web-based. Users may be anxious to demonstrate their intrepidity to friends and family at home by uploading pictures to photo-sharing services like Flickr and Facebook Photos which are big consumers of the ADSL’s smaller upstream channel and these days permit any number of photos to be uploaded one after the other, hogging the upstream bandwidth for far longer.

What I’ve learned:

– turn off non-essential network services on your own machine. You’ve probably forgotten about the two VPNs and the zero-configuration service that runs all the time, broadcasting and tickling the internet connection. I did. Don’t contribute to the problem!

– if you can get access to the config pages of the router (with permission, of course) you could experiment with changing QoS (Quality of Service) settings and maybe also isolating wi-fi clients to prevent traffic passing between them unnecessarily. A nice side-effect is an improvement in security between the clients.

– if the router is a home-user model, you should not be surprised if it cannot handle the number of concurrent connections and routing requirements of even a moderately busy hostel without becoming congested and unresponsive. They generally only have passive cooling and are liable to overheat – remember that hardware functioning is not always an “on” or “off” matter. Overheating can reduce performance, so don’t let them make a neat little stack of the gear and spread it out a bit.

I’m sure there are other steps you can take to get around the bandwidth problem, but when power-cycling the switching and routing hardware, remember that they may be users on hotel-owned, ethernet-connected elsewhere in the building who may be paying by the minute for the service.

Something that has occurred to me is that if the congestion or unreliability is mainly the wi-fi (that part of these little routers often seems to go wrong when the ethernet is still perfectly fine) and you happen to have a small wireless access point, you could plug this into a free ethernet socket on the switch, thereby offering a less-congested wireless option to those in the know.