Each of our offices has a network connection with a certain amount of bandwidth flowing through it. Think of it as a large pipe line of water. As each sales associate comes into the office and logs on to the network, it’s like turning on a faucet that accesses the main pipe line. As more users turn on their taps, there’s less water available to flow. The flow to each user’s tap begins to be affected by less and less water and it slows to a trickle. If a user is using their water for basic purposes, there is generally plenty enough to go around. If users begin to exploit the water and take more than is necessary, this adversely affects everyone.
If sales associates are accessing non business related content, especially content that is bandwidth intensive (streaming music or video, bit torrent activity etc.), it causes an unnatural reduction of the main office and company bandwidth and all users are affected by it.
This non business related content can be accessed by the office computers, the agent’s own personal desktop computers, laptops, iPads and smart phones. Any device that’s connected to your office network with either a wired or a wireless connection can affect the overall office bandwidth.
Our company network exists for one reason, to provide access to the internet, internal network files and email servers for all sales associates and employees for the purpose of conducting real estate related business activity only.
There are a few things that we can do to help keep our network running smoothly.
1. Educate sales associates about the acceptable use of our network and why it’s important to all of us that they all support our efforts to keep it flowing smoothly. Repeat this every few months to remind them and make sure that all new agents are also made aware of our policies.
2. Monitor activity through out the day and pay special attention to who’s online when things seem to slow down. Does it happen when a certain sales associate arrives each day?
3. Make sure that your office computers all have solid and dependable anti- virus protection software installed and that it’s updated on a regular basis.
4. Check all sales associates’ computers to make sure that they have an active, up to date anti-virus program installed before connecting their machines to our network.
5. Contact the Real Estate One I.T. Department Help Desk to assist with issues concerning network performance and questions regarding abuse.
Here’s a list of some of the most bandwidth intensive activities that everyone in your office should be educated about and advised against performing on our networks. We do our best to block as much of this activity as possible but sites are constantly changing and certain portals must remain open for our overlapping business needs.
BitTorrent – Every User Shares the Load
First and probably the number one worst bandwidth abusing activity that could possibly be performed on our network would be downloading files using BitTorrent software.
Bit Torrent is a popular technology used for sharing very large files over the Internet. BitTorrent breaks a file into smaller chunks and keeps track of the users who have received the file. When you download a “torrent,” you are also uploading a part of the file to another user. BitTorrent balances the load on the computer, because broadband download speeds are faster than upload speeds.
When someone uses BitTorrent to download a “torrent” on our network it will take all of the available bandwidth, using it to both download and share the file with other users at the same time.
Here’s a list of some of the more popular BitTorrent clients.
U Torrent
Vuze
qTorrent
Tixati
Bit Tornado
ABC Bit Torrent
Halite
Transmission Bit Torrent
Bit Comet
Duluge
Turbo Bit Torrent
BT Junkie
BTorrent.com
Bush Torrent & Torrent Reactor
ISO Hunt
Meganova
Mininova
Pirate Bay
Torrent Portal
Torrent Spy
Torrentz
Kickass Torrents
Demonoid
Peer 2 Peer Sharing
Downloading Music
Eg. Limewire, Frostwire etc.
Streaming music
Streaming music sites – iheart.com, Pandora, Last.fm, AOL Radio, Yahoo Music, Rhapsody
iTunes – Streaming music from the cloud, internet radio stations, streaming movies
Online games and gaming sites
This includes Facebook apps and games
Streaming Video / Movies
YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, Skype, Netflix, iTunes Movies
Viruses and Malware
Not only are viruses damaging, every type of virus takes up bandwidth. Many viruses can cause programs to run in the background, slowing down your connection.
The speed of our network is often compared to the speed of home cable connections. Home Cable connections are shared and are not capable of providing us a secure private company network. Secure, dedicated and private business networks are generally triple the cost per “megabit per second” of home cable connections.
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