Blocking or Traffic Shaping

[SLR]

On the MX devices and or MR devices, which do you find is better?

Block streaming or make streaming availability painstakingly slow via traffic shaping. I have a lot of users eating up bandwidth at locations using youtube, twitch, hulu, spotify, and so forth. We get a lot of complaints from sites that have smaller internet lines running off celluar (cradlepoint) with a VOIP phone system in place. Calls get dropped. We have traffic shaping rules in place for SIP at high priority and All music & video at obey network per client limit low priority. I am rethinking this for all music/video and customizing the bandwidth limit to something incredibly slow.

Good or bad?

What are your practices you put into place. We do not block things unless it comes straight down from management at each location. (crazy, I know).

[SoCalRacer · Accepted solution]

Generally it is easier to throttle or limit the bandwidth to a service than to completely block it, so that is usually the preference, I would say.

Many times it goes back to company policy. If company policy says no social media or youtube, then we just alert managers about it and they coach the employees.

[SLR]

That is what I was thinking. Unless the manager tells me to block it, I will just throttle it.

thanks for the insight.

[jdsilva]

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@SoCalRacer wrote:

Many times it goes back to company policy. If company policy says no social media or youtube, then we just alert managers about it and they coach the employees.

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This!  OMG all freaking day this!

Employees misusing company resources, especially to the determent of others, is an HR problem, _not_ an IT problem.