Bandwidth
SupportAbility is incredibly lightweight with regards to its bandwidth footprint. As long as you have access to 4G or even 3G connection, SupportAbility should function fine.
Unfortunately, the number of signal bars on a tablet device is related more to the phone reception signal and is not always related to the internet speed of the device. Whilst there are possible 'blackout' areas where coverage is unavailable, our they are generally few in number and they don't change. So if you know you are working in such a spot, you can work around it by printing out Activity forms for example, with the required information before you leave.
If very large files are uploaded to Clients and/or Staff records and you need others to download and access those files, you may hit the odd performance issue.
Static files such as Javascript and CSS are cached by the browser and don't really impact bandwidth to any statistically significant degree.
Following is a list of page sizes of the most common dynamic pages that Staff access in SupportAbility:
- Dashboard: ~10KB
- Client Details Screen: ~24KB
- Client Goal Screen: ~12.5KB
- Journal Entry Screen: ~12.5KB
- Activity Edit Screen: ~20KB
The reality is that the bandwidth utilisation and consumption of any given user is based on three key factors:
- The page sizes of screens SupportAbility (minor factor)
- How many pages the staff member accesses in any given time period (minor factor)
- How many document (attachments) the staff member uploads or downloads in any given period (major factor)
Bandwidth utilisation and consumption is not affected by a Staff members privileges and access level. Rather, it is a result of how that Staff member and other Staff use the system. For example, if one Staff member uploads a 20MB word document attachment to a client record and another Staff member downloads it, that consumes 40MB. This is equivalent to 2000 page loads of the activity edit screen. The way Staff use the system contributes to bandwidth consumption exponentially more than SupportAbility page sizes.
A minimum of 12Mb/s is required to run SA optimally. If Staff members are experiencing performance issues, it is important to check the speed of their internet connection at the time this is being experienced. Tools such as https://www.speedtest.net/ can be used to help.