As online education begins to take off, its best-known obstacle is bandwidth.
Limited bandwidth has a direct impact on the sophistication of technology that courses can use.
Others, aiming to compete in market conditions projected for two years hence, are developing courses with heavy bandwidth requirements. Niceties such as audio, video, animation, simulations, and games eat up more bandwidth, may require plug-ins or Java applets on the desktop, and can run afoul of firewalls. Older browsers often cannot handle much in the way of multimedia. Some companies do want heavy-bandwidth features, however. Silicon Valley Bank , for example, chose to host internally due to firewall issues, but the trade-off is that employees can't get access to the learning system from outside the office.