Funny. Behind the covers, the reason they block WebEx is almost surely because their horrifically common-sense-challenged IT cannot handle the bandwidth requirements. It’s common in a lot of government facilities. I work with the feds a lot, and they often ask us to host WebEx/GoToMeeting/whatever and then they call from home (screaming kids included), or sometimes from a cafe down the street.
It’s not that they don’t have the pipes into the buildings (they have those in spades), it’s because the crappy low-bid contractors they hire could not put it together correctly. You would be amazed how many expensive routers they can place in a 20 machine office. Seriously, they were buying $100,000 Cisco machines to switch 20-30 desktops, and that connects to “the WAN backbone” (a leased line) one floor down through more switches, including a monster “core” switch that makes the Cisco look cheap. Sometimes they trunk between them using ATM – !!within the fracking building!! – just because some consultant told them how awesome it would look on a resume.
I once counted $5 Million in network hardware to support an office of about 50 PowerPoint warriors (no A/V, just docs) get to an OC-3, which they used exclusively to cruise the web and maybe send/receive an occasional email. The irony? They all had junk workstations, because they needed to “lower costs”.
Funny. Behind the covers, the reason they block WebEx is almost surely because their horrifically common-sense-challenged IT cannot handle the bandwidth requirements. It’s common in a lot of government facilities. I work with the feds a lot, and they often ask us to host WebEx/GoToMeeting/whatever and then they call from home (screaming kids included), or sometimes from a cafe down the street.
It’s not that they don’t have the pipes into the buildings (they have those in spades), it’s because the crappy low-bid contractors they hire could not put it together correctly. You would be amazed how many expensive routers they can place in a 20 machine office. Seriously, they were buying $100,000 Cisco machines to switch 20-30 desktops, and that connects to “the WAN backbone” (a leased line) one floor down through more switches, including a monster “core” switch that makes the Cisco look cheap. Sometimes they trunk between them using ATM – !!within the fracking building!! – just because some consultant told them how awesome it would look on a resume.
I once counted $5 Million in network hardware to support an office of about 50 PowerPoint warriors (no A/V, just docs) get to an OC-3, which they used exclusively to cruise the web and maybe send/receive an occasional email. The irony? They all had junk workstations, because they needed to “lower costs”.