Comments on: Take back Control of Your Bandwidth

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:11:17 +0000

David, thank you for your response. I would like to point you in the direction of the definition of “bandwidth control” – “Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications (traffic, packets) on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance.” Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_control

By: David Attard

David Attard — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:38:29 +0000

Mike, I would have to disagree with your statement here. Bandwidth control is a set of features, some of which are implemented by WebMonitor, others which are yet to be developed. We don’t advertise “Quality of Service” or “Bandwidth Shaping” and hence there is no false advertising going on.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:06:27 +0000

I’m aware GFI doesnt currently support any kind of QoS or bandwidth shaping, however the marketing implies you do, which is false advertising. Everything in the post you made, and throughout the Webmonitor application, the word “bandwidth” is used where the phrase “Download Quota” would make more sense. There is no way setting a quota allows a company to control bandwidth consumption to any great extent. What if as a school IT department, I want to allow the use of youtube, but limit each user to non-HD content? not possible – they’ll just eat their quota faster. I feel your marketing department needs to have a chat with the technical team, and if you still are not in agreement, look up the definition of “Bandwidth”

By: David Attard

David Attard — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:48:32 +0000

Quality of service or bandwidth shaping which is the feature you are mentioning is not something which is supported by GFI WebMonitor however the features implemented by the product are still sufficient to provide adequate bandwidth control to most SMBs. This feature is on the product backlog.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:26:25 +0000

This is all well and good, except for one little thing – GFI seems to have no comprehension of the term BANDWIDTH. Everything that’s been advertised as bandwidth control in this product is actually simply data allowances. There’s a big difference between a bandwidth limit and a data allowance, and allowances don’t solve slow internet issues! Imagine you have a 100Mb/s link to the internet, but at peak times your users are using bandwidth intensive applications. You could set a data usage limit as GFI now allows, to limit each of them to 10MB a day. However, they can all still transfer that 10MB at up to 100Mb/s, and then afterwards, they’re cut off. With a bandwidth limit, you could limit each user to 1Mb/s on that particular content – they can then use as much as they like, but you’ve limited how much of the 100Mb/s total bandwidth they can consume – this is similar to traffic shaping, and all big consumer ISPs do it.

By: Candice Telano

Candice Telano — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:25:17 +0000

Andy is right on the money. And even if it’s really more of a human resource or management decision to install keyloggers or screenshot programs rather than the ITs, most often than not, it’s the IT personnel who gets the flack if a staff member complains of slow computer performance because of those monitoring software.

That is too bad for your IT people who take the brunt of your staff’s resentment. That’s a stressor, you know. Not only does it strain the dealings between your IT and your other personnel, it affects the mood of the office that infects other people.

I should know.

By: Andy Anderson

Andy Anderson — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:00:52 +0000

Contrary to what others might think, a bandwidth monitor can actually save professional relationships. People don’t need to feel “watched” or “monitored” when a company uses it. It helps to manage resources without having to instigate stringent “no unnecessary web surfing” rules and have supervisors watch over the PCs of their team members all the time.

This might even reduce the use of “screen shot” programs that companies install in their workers PCs so they’d know what their people are looking at at the net. Maybe, not entirely replace those programs but limit the regularity of how often it takes snapshots. Those programs hog computer resources, too, you know.

By: Scott Parmet

Scott Parmet — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:53:06 +0000

It’s a big difference between standing over their shoulder and watching everything they do and benchmarking, for example, the miles-per-gallon of your engine. If anyone tries to tell you these two behaviors are the same, you need to make it very clear that it’s your job to keep your business’s engine running.