Can I rent bandwidth for a day?

November 18, 2011 2:53 PM

Where can I rent bandwidth for a few hours?

The design department here needs to do a big web presentation. They are using WebEx and when they did their dry run today they found the whole thing is lagging really bad. This seems to be due to our T1 that is our shared phone and internet. We need to upgrade that I know. That's the plan, but they need to give this presentation Monday.

Is there some place in the Chicago area where we can rent 3 desks with high speed internet access and a phone? OpenDesks looks like a possibility, but I don't see anywhere on the site where they say if the offices have internet and how much bandwidth they offer.

Basically we need a cyber cafe for business. Reliable fast broadband and phone for 3-4 hours. Is this a pipe dream?

posted by MrBobaFett to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Look for videoconference facilities — they frequently rent 6-12 person rooms that include access to high-speed internet.
posted by RichardP at 3:05 PM on November 18, 2011

Is there any reason a LTE mifi from your favorite cell provider wouldn't work for this ?

10-20mbit, portable, can probably be cancelled ?
posted by iamabot at 3:17 PM on November 18, 2011

You could rent a meeting room or even just a suite at a local hotel. They should be able to confirm how much bandwidth they have.
As an aside, in my experience WebEx isn't that thirsty since it goes through a central server so you're not streaming to every participant. Assuming you're not using their VOIP that is--which is pretty poor I've found. I would feel pretty comfortable using my tethered 4G phone.
posted by NailsTheCat at 7:44 PM on November 18, 2011

Check out your local university to see if they rent rooms. If they do, they'll probably be cheaper than a hotel.

(The internet to the province of BC comes out of the basement of my university's downtown campus. Working on that campus was awesome.)
posted by wenat at 7:50 PM on November 18, 2011

We'll see how it works, but the solution seemed to be for the design dept to hold the meeting at our bosses house since your average cable modem has 10x the bandwidth we have here.

Also I don't know WebEx very well but the problem they were having was that they would advance a slide and the client wouldn't see the new slide for 1-3 minutes. I also can't be sure they may not have been configuring something right since they didn't come to me until the end of day on Friday for this, when their meeting was today.

Here's hoping for the best. Thanks.
posted by MrBobaFett at 5:15 AM on November 21, 2011