Managing the Bandwidth Devil

Contributed by Guillaume Foutry


Internet in Liberia is slow and expensive. Even if things have improved with the landing of the fiber optic cable in Monrovia in October last year and the introduction of the 4G by Cellcom a few months ago, it is still an issue. To many organizations operating in Liberia, Internet access is critical to their business, so they have to bear the cost. The problem is that companies do not get Internet speed comparable to what you would get in Europe or Northern America: the fastest they can get in terms of unlimited data download is via VSAT for a monthly bill going up to thousands of US dollars.

So organizations want to make sure they make the best use of their bandwidth, especially for an office with dozens of employees. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that some workers use Internet for private purposes that are bandwidth black hole such as You Tube, iTunes, music download, etc. And so no one is able to use the Internet for essential activities such as emailing or research. This creates serious headaches as we have met people being mad about it, telling us they pay serious money for their Internet and they cannot do anything.

At NATC, not only we have great solutions to provide you with Internet access but we are also experts at bandwidth management. Our favorite solution is Meraki: we connect a Meraki Access Point to your modem and them, from a web browser, we can manage who has access to how much bandwidth at what time. This give you a lot of flexibility: you can block all non-work related websites, give more bandwidth to important users, monitor employees' usage of the bandwidth in real time. It is a really easy to use and affordable system that will allow you to get your money worth and master the bandwidth devil.