Anyone interested in sharing bandwidth?
Yesterdays Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE was pretty popular. According to the stats we had 97 listeners. The problem is that the stats also show that we had quite a few people who were unable to connect becuase we had run out of bandwith (we also had a bandwidth problem from our studio which I will come on to in a bit).
How does the bandwidth work. We broadcast from Bremen in Germany using a DSL connection. We feed to the Community Media Association in Sheffield, UK. They have a commercial operation who sell us bandwidth. Bandwidth for streaming is not cheap. We presently have enough bandwidth for up to 100 listeners at 56kps. We would like to increase this to 200 but can’t really justify the expenditure at present. But we actually buy the bandwidth on a 24/7 basis. And we only use it for 2 hours a month. There is a pretty strong case for bandwidth sharing here. So – if you would like to use our spare badwidth for broadcasting something to do with learning please get in touch. It is a crying shame to see it there unused. And if anyone woudl be interested in coming in with some money we could all benefit from a better service. Just email me on graham10 [at] mac [dot] com. Whilst on the subject if anyone needs help in how to do live streaming radio do drop us a line. However, we use Macs – we do not know the setup for PCs or Linux.
Now for the dedicated techy reader here was our local bandwidth problem. Our present upload capacity is 24kps. This is enough for our stream and for a skype connection. But for yesterdays feature on Cwmglas School I was trying to bring in my colleague Jenny Hughes via a skype to skype line and the school through skype to telephone. And that was just too much. The result is that the stream kept rebuffering. After the show we got on to our ISP website and found we could treble our bandwidth with a package which costs less than we are paying at the moment. The ISP had upgraded their service but not told us and we had to apply on line for the new package. It may be worth you checking whether you can do this – I dare say ISPs are the smae the world over.
I also started communicating with others via twitter. I noticed that there were also people who actually read my messages, as I was getting some @me tweets too. It is interesting how people communicate directly and indirectly with others by sharing links, responding to questions, providing additional insights and sometimes even guiding in alternative directions, which they also find useful. All of a sudden micro-communication was increasingly entering my world. Because I started following more people, more twitters also decided to follow me – I still haven’t figured out how selective people are about who they follow, but I have ended up even following some of those who my twitter-fellows follow because of the tweet-conversations they are following (confusing, ha?). In this sense twitter has enabled me to enlarge my connections and networks [even if in a rather lurking way, as I tend to communicate, not exclusively, but more often with those who I already knew from other venues]. Micro-blogging has largely contributed to my learning.
