Bandwidth Hogs
This one goes back a few weeks now. We had a patron approach the reference desk and complain that she was having difficultly with our Wi-Fi. As it turned out her problem was that she was trying to watch a lengthy streaming video and it was taking forever to download. The person staffing our reference desk at the time was stunned upon learning that people were taking up so much of our bandwidth and I explained to her that this was probably the beginning of a trend.
Streaming video is possibly the greatest free resource that is outside of our general awareness (with the exception of YouTube). I stopped paying for cable myself. Granted I never watched a lot of tv to begin with, but the few shows I care about (with the exception of Doctor Who) are all available for free online. In fact I’m multitasking by watching last night’s Daily Show as I write this (a good interview with John Waters incidentally). So we can definitely expect our bandwidth to deplete as more patrons come in with their laptops, and I’ll be one of them (as soon as I get my laptop).
Tags: bandwidth, Daily Show, laptop, libraries, streaming video, wi-fi, wireless, youtube
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