The Cost Vs Benefit of Additional Bandwidth
You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too much bandwidth. As I think back over the years, from my original 30 character per second modem, to the big jump to 1200, then 2400 (240 Characters per Second) BAUD modems (SEER for Software was originally developed by a disbursed team using 2400 BAUD modems) to megabits of bandwidth.
We learned some years ago that speed was not the only consideration, but reliability was key as well. Once we had a DSL line that went down. 3 day turnaround to fix. Then a T1 vendor (high reliability 1.5megabits) who got in a fight with the phone company and got our line along with all their customers shut down.
We are making the big jump, once again in El Segundo, going from a t1 to a bonded t1 (3megabits)
And how will that impact productivity? Experience tells us there will be a few miserable days when the change brings the company to its knees (we have people scattered about the free world.) Our staff offered to run SEER-IT and estimate the project but I really didn’t want to know… we are going to go ahead and we know it will be ugly. Then, after the misery we expect to be servicing our remote employees twice as fast as we do now. Of course none of them will be happy since the average bandwidth in homes is still higher than 3megabits.
Then the payback… Over the first few months changes in productivity of developers will not makeup for the lost time during transition.
Following those few months we could reduce each remote developer’s wait time by 10 or more minutes per day. That doesn’t seem like much but in addition to the lowering of physical wait times, the psychological relief will likely provide double the benefit. Using SEER I find the additional benefit of up to 3% (via the turnaround time) by improving the interactivity and user experience of our developers not having to wait so long. Well worth the cost.
I did not include the rest of the staff in the assumed productivity calculation since those getting email, downloading an occasional file, etc. will likely not result in any real savings.
I find it very interesting to be able to determine the ROI using SEER estimating software in such a fashion rather than the traditional guesses or informal analysis.
PS: Current economic conditions have made some really good deals on bandwidth available. I wish we could have gotten FIOS or cable in our building. We would have used the less expensive bandwidth with a t1 as our safety net. But we can’t buy that way in our office building.
PS2: We also looked at using a remote server via a vendor with mega-bandwidth but it was nearly impossible to get any information from the vendor. Still if the vendor had been responsive that approach would have provided MUCH access than the bonded t1′s.
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Project Prediction Infographic
Dreams of bandwidth yesteryear… my first modem was an olive drab Bell 103, which still had its Bell system inventory tag on it. Amazing what you could find at flea markets in those days.