Because the city teams were in China, we didn't have this luxury. Everything had to be behind Uber's beyondcorp equivalent, and there was no real way to auth folks from the Chinese mainland. Our only surface was the browser.
If you don't quite believe it, it's almost certainly less per annum then 2 months of a typical mid-level SRE's loaded cost, even in 2016. Bandwidth would have been not great, way under a gigabit, but it wouldn't matter in this case.
