Hope i am posting in the correct group if not point me in the right direction.
We are looking to upgrade out data lines to the Internet. We currently have three independent T1 lines and are having bandwidth issues that may also be related to the difficulties in managing three independent T1 lines and our old firewall and gateway anti-virus technologies. We are looking to increase our bandwidth as well as a parallel project to replace our aging border technologies.
We here have about 325 users and dedicate 2 full T1's to their internet surfing as well as ingoing and outgoing email. We have a third T1 line that is dedicated to our VPN to connect with our 40 or so small field office. I am curious the amount of bandwidth other organizations have as well as the number of users that supports and if this seems adequate for their needs. I am considering a 12Mb fractional T3 as I received a very good offer, but am concerned this is overkill (the necessary hardware for the T3 line is expensive) and I could purchase less bandwidth via independent T1 lines and save some money. However the advantage of the T3 line is that it will then be very easy to turn on additional bandwidth if necessary.
Just trying to get a bit of a reality check on what others are doing. Thanks
In most of the cases - consolidated bandwitdh is always preffered. and its a fact that around the world now high bandwitdh interfaces like DS3's, T3 or E3 are provided on drasticly cheaper rates...
We vary... 175 to 250 users (but over 700 registered hosts in our tables!). We have a gigabit service.
Our long term monitoring suggests that our average busy rate is on the order of 64 Kbps, with 5-minute peaks up to 110 or so but not particularily often. So, our monitoring statistics suggest that we wouldn't suffer unduely by having merely 128 Kbps.
None the less, this analysis is not really detailed enough, as in particular it does not deal with response time. When one of our users interacts with an application at HQ, the response might be a few megabytes (e.g., web page pictures), but the user is a lot happier to have those squirted to them quickly (and then spend a bunch of 'eye time' on them) then to have to wait for them to draw before the 'eye time'. When the 'eye time' is included, the average data transfer rate is not high -- and the monitoring tools aren't fine-enough grained to pick out a several megabytes transfered quickly and then eyeballed, compared to the same number of megabytes transfered over 1 minute.
There have been a couple of occasions during which our interprovincial link to HQ has dropped to 100 Mbit, which is still far faster than our measured transfer requirements -- but people notice and do grumble.
Anyhow, check to see whether you can get "burstable fibre". That'd probably be a fibre with a 100 Mbit modal bandwidth, rate-shaped to whatever speed you are willing to pay for. If you are in a desired business neighbourhood, the companies might install the fibre for cheap, figuring to amoratize the costs over all the other nearby businesses they think they can sell to. There might even already be fibre loop running to within a couple of blocks. For one of the ISPs that runs to our building, we traded install costs against space: they put their local optical switching hub into our telecomms closet and didn't charge us for fibre install.
Equipment to handle 100Base-LX is fairly inexpensive -- much less so than to handle T3. And the price of 20 Mb burstable might only be a fraction of the cost of a T3.
One disadvantage of burstable fibre compared to T1 or T3 is that burstable fibre is shared at some aggregation point or other: you are getting a link to "the internet", whereas T1 or T3 you can go point-to-point. That used to make a big difference for multimedia, but that's been more or less eliminated by better compression and throwing bandwidth at the problem.
Another disadvantage is that the rates are not necessarily symmetric; you might not be able to transfer outwards with burstable as quickly as you can receive. Rate symmetry is important for some applications and not important for others.
If you can find a provider of Metro Ethernet/fiber, you may find that it is a much better solution. Walter touched on this some using the term "burstable fiber". However, this does not even need to be burstable - they might just offer a 10MB throughput, or other flavors. Just the face that they hand off the signal to you with fiber often makes this a good option. The equipment is much cheaper, more up to date and easier to maintain. The service will most likely be as cheap, or cheaper, than the DS3 service. The provider will probably offer to hand it off with copper as well (the provide a transceiver to convert the single mode fiber to copper) so that you don't need an expensive fiber port on your device.
DS3 is a dying breed. Even if you go with that solution now, you will probably be finding yourself switching to the Metro E solution in the near future.
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