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Reducing travel and overall turnaround time is at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Conducting network analysis usually involves sending a specialised network engineer to location to capture to discover speeds, data and buffering.

I recently had the pleasure of working with a global company who wanted to very quickly and easily understand their network capacity and overcome any potential hurdles with their infrastructure.

With video becoming more and more key to businesses, delivery over current networks is a hot topic. With differences in bandwidth across the globe being as varied as they are, it is important to understand what load can be handled and where, so huge parts of a network don’t fail if a company wide webcast where to go out.

For this particular client network diagnostic, the client in question wanted to test 5 locations:

Belgium, Australia, France, Nigeria, Singapore

I was asked to provide the company with metrics telling them exactly which locations could handle a specified bandwidth. I achieved this by harnessing the power of WordPress and it’s depth of reporting.

The WordPress instance I used connects to an AWS S3 bucket, which provides the hosting for all media. When a video is uploaded to WP it is transcoded into multiple bitrates that are defined as media type profiles. Each bitrate version of the video then has it’s own URL which can be embedded in a webpage or be used as part of an ABR video.

A new intranet page was then set-up with each of the bitrate type videos embedded in one page. Users from all 5 locations were then instructed to navigate to the page and playback each of the videos. The bitrates used were:

200k, 400k, 600k, 1000k, 1200k, 1800k, 2500k, 4500k

Once all of the videos had been played, I was able to track the buffer rate of all of the videos comparatively.

Comparing buffer time vs location meant we were able to define the optimum bitrate for each office.

Using wordpress to reach a global network shows how you can utilize your platform, alongside good planning and problem solving. This helps to achieve a variety of solutions, from user management to network testing and everything in between, all from the comfort of one location.