Is My IT Dept Accurate of Full of It?

I've talked our company into buying an island and doing a proof of concept with Second Life and branding, etc. My question regards the following statement of warning from our IT department. Can someone knowledgeable about the SL technology tell me if this is truely a potential problem:

"Secondly, our biggest concern here is bandwidth. Running 10 people on Second Life at a time can significantly increase the bandwidth utilization and in a typical business day it will impact business functions, including slowing access to email, KC, accounting systems, and other web resources. We are not currently configured to handle live streaming and 3-D graphics via the web. This would require a significant investment in our overall bandwidth and internal network infrastructure."

Appreciate the input!

Pilgram Dovgal

IT people make up lies to avoid work. It's a fact. Every IT department in every major organisation in the world does this.

This particular excuse sounds like it might have atleast a ring of truth to it. It's probably accurate to say that the problems they list really do exist, but can be worked around. However, this will probably require that the IT people put down their magazine for a moment and do some work.

I believe it is true, Yes. SL is streaming everything to you essentially, and taking up the bandwidth of your network. More than one person takes up even more.

On my home network its obvious when I'm on SL as my parents' internet slows down, while I seemingly am doing fine usually.. but if they are doing something like streaming a video while I'm in SL, I'll be lagging almost surely (We have evil internet too lol..sot hat doesn't help)

In this instance they are correct.

It uses bandwidth...yes.


I imagine, however, that your company is downloading and uploading at or around 1mbs? Maybe more if they are on a T1 connection.

I don't think one person using SL on a companies T1-T4 is going to 'slow workflow.'

My opinion.

Did anyone watch "Kid Nation" last night?

Basically they won a reward that was a bunch of arcade games and a pool table. After winning this reward no one wanted to do any work they wanted to play.

In many cases thats what the internet in offices has done.

Second Life is worse.

They say running 10 people though, not one, which could make some impact on just about any connection.

How many of us have experienced a big time slow down while trying to surf the web while someone else at home was downloading mp3s, or torrents etc? So it's probably real in my uneducated guess.

If you work for, say, IBM, then yes, they are full of it. If you work for a tiny company that doesn't have gobs of extra bandwidth then no, they're probably not full of it.

From the streaming/3D-graphics comment, they might misunderstand how SL works and be overestimating the amount of bandwidth it takes.

Maybe you could do a bit of research on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping and, if it looks like it might work, suggest that they implement something like that internally to limit the amount of bandwidth that SL is taking..

Thanks for the input. I'll need to have some sort of response to their concerns or the execs will freak. We use WebEx quite a bit for meetings and training sessions in our company. Any chance I can use the webex comparison to say that it will have the same effect on our bandwidth to have 10 SL users on at once?

Meade, thanks for the link. I'll use that info to craft a possible solution to the IT warnings.

Otherwise, all the responses were dead-on accurate when it comes to our IT dept. Jeez. I have never seen a group of people have so many freakin' toys in their cubicles and take so many breaks to run to the deli.

Yes, it is quite accurate, unless your company has a fairly fat pipe to the internet. More than a full T1.



Sound like someone has an axe to grind... otherwise, BS.



Sure, it can be worked around, by spending more money. That's not the IT department that needs to be talked to about it, but management. You know, the guys in suits that sit around all day and make more unnecessary work for everyone and say "no" to anything that costs money.

Go to the IT guys. Get them to carefully measure you while you are using SL from work.

Use it in some way that simulates what people will actually do once the island is up. For example, go to one office building (IBM or SUN, maybe) and hang out there for a while. Once the textuers all download, the bandwitch required might not be too great.

Do the same thing for other intensive work that you guys do at work, like scoping out babes on YouTube.

Well, before buying the island, run up 10 SL sessions on your network and see what happens!

There are many small, medium sized and large companies who have bought an island for a SL presence Pilgram. All of them, apart from IBM maybe, may have had issues with their IT departments. Why not look some of them up in world and ask them what kind of setup they have for what they wanted to achieve.

No point you running around repeating the same mistakes they made.

My company's IT guys are really good at foosball.

It's true because my boss told me she doesn't give a crap about me playing SL when I'm the only one here, but she doesn't want me to do it when the offices are open because it slows down everyone else's computer. That's just ME playing.

Unless you work in a rather large office, they are not making it up.

Most of SL's bandwith consumption is on the download side, not the upload, as for most of the web.

It runs at about 80-100kbps (100,000 bits per second) per avatar, steady state (and not minimized). When you connect to a new region (login, teleport, etc.) or greatly change the textures you are looking at, bandwidth use will spike up to fill whatever you have the network slider set to -- maybe 400-500kbps. For me, if I set the slider below 300kbps, SL crashes. I don't know if that is generally true, though.

A T1 is only 1544 kbps, so 4 users teleporting at once would pretty much fill it up. Many carriers are offering E1s for data; still only 2048 kbps.

On the bright side, even if your office is small-medium size, your internet connectivity may be multiple T1s or even a T3 (44 Mbps). Medium-large offices are now routinely getting 10Mbps links, and much of that bandwidth may be lying fallow. It totally depends on what your business already has for connectivity. That's what you need to find out - I doubt they'll buy more bits just for SL.

Traffic shaping is not going to be of much help here; SL really is streaming all that unique data. The only thing traffic shaping can do is improve performance a bit by smoothing out spikes, and also prioritizing business traffic above that of SL so that real office work can be done, at the cost of SL performance.

Just for ballpark, Preferences allows up to 1500 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up, although many people get by with 500 32 -- I usually am averaging 800 Kbps down and 96 Kbps up, but often move around texture-heavy places and stream music. I go into preferences and throttle down to 500 in busy or laggy places. As others have mentioned... I would fire up a client and do what you would be doing and measure it. Setting up an island begs for plenty of planning and testing first.

They're not full of it, actually. I've run SL on my machine at work and it does indeed pull bandwidth from the rest of the office, and that's just one client. In a corporate intranet, the IT department usually is usually at the bottom of the totem pole that other machines above them get to the internet through. So when you slow down the system at the bottom, everyone above you feels the effect as well.

Depends on your service provider, ours happens to be one dedicated DSL shared between 13 offices, so that's stretching thin already.

How does this amount of use compare to typical office internet use?

Such as browsing typical web pages (not streaming video) and using email, passing back and forth spread sheets and project charts?

Although I personally think them banning SL from work is more than jusitfiable on productivity grounds ..

I would think one person taking up the same resources whole sections of people used to would be an issue.

General office apps, so long as they do not stream either audio or video, take up much MUCH less bandwidth/person. It's difficult to use more than 20kbps just using email/browser etc.. And of course it's much more sporatic - if you are not streaming anything your office pc is using virtually zero bandwidth.

Oh and in ref. to webex: webex now offers video conferencing, which would be basically the same as SL.

However, 95% of webex sessions do not involve video. They are application sharing sessions with an associated audio conference. Application sharing of a powerpoint session where slides change about twice a minute will run only ~40 kbps (note: it will spike much higher during session setup). If the audioconference is also done via webex or another IP phone, add another 100kbps.

oh, and above, when I said "steady state" I basically mean standing around doing nothing or just IMing. Any time you change your point of view (e.g. walk) you download new stuff and use more bandwidth.

I have used earlier video conference systems.

It was never One person video conferencing with another person.

It was one conference room in one city to another Conference room in another city.

Thats a bit different than each person using up this amount of computer resources.

But.. if there is more than one video conference going, as can happen, then it is similar I believe, yes?

Someone entering a new area with their bandwidth limit set to the default (500 kbits/sec) will probably use all of that for around 2 minutes. So i f you log 10 people on at once, that's 5000 kb/s or 5 megabits / second. A typical home cable connection is 6-8 megabits / second.

Just standing around, each person will probably use about 50 kb/s with spikes up to 200 for a second when something happens such an avatar teleporting in, or something new rezzed. that's rare enough and for a short enough duration usually that you could assume the 50 (which is probably even high). so that's 500 kb/s for all 10 or half a megabit. That probably won't effect the connection you have enough to notice even if it's a T1. Email, web browsing, aren't bandwidth intensive enough to be effected by that, unless you're passing several megabyte sized files. Also, do you send email and files to other offices or is it mostly within the same building/complex? because if it's internal, then you shouldn't be using your internet connection for that, just your internal network. In that case all you would have to worry about is web browsing.

In conclusion, their concern is valid, but it's a close enough call that some testing to determine whether it really is a problem before investing in more bandwidth, is probably warranted.

but each conference is multiple people on each end.

If its just one person you just call into the meeting and phone conference.