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  • From: David Rasch <rasch AT raschnet.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] connectivity choices for small business?
  • Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:19:36 -0500

Tony:
We do backups of 30 gig databases over our T-1 link ever night. By utlizing a process similar to "rsync" these backups go off without a problem and utilize relatively little bandwidth. We utilize a piece of software called "rdiff-backup" for this.

You can see the graph for the last week of how our backups affect our bandwidth usage:
http://www.raschnet.com/~rasch/bandwidth/week.png

Michael:
I also didn't mention that we have each of the 30+ employees have and utilize VoIP phones that use this connection. We're currently investigating a second connection for the phones, but not because of bandwidth needs rather because the internet is a wild wild place over which to send VoIP and we're looking to see far better call quality. That being said, we've done a bit of connection "shaping" to insure that regardless of data activity, the phones are usable, and almost always have better quality than my cell phone.

All:
My message is simply that it might make a bit more sense to setup a router that can do some connection prioritization to make sure the connection you have is being best utilized. For this, I'd highly recommend sending a note to the TriLUG (http://www.trilug.org) mailing list or IRC channel #trilug asking for some assistance. It's likely that you can get some free help, and even more if you're willing to buy someone lunch or dinner in exchange for picking their brain. However, if it makes more financial sense to just throw more bandwidth at the problem, then by all means, go for it :).
-David

Tony Spencer wrote:

My setup is small with no more than 4 people connected at a time but I've
got a lot of processes that eat up a bit of bandwidth such as pulling down
backups of databases from a colo.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Rasch [mailto:rasch AT raschnet.com] Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 10:12 AM
To: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
Subject: Re: [internetworkers] connectivity choices for small business?

Just out of curiosity, could you give us an idea of what size organization you're working with?
At $WORK, we share a T-1 among 30+ employees without issue. Just for reference, this is symmetric at 1.5M. We've setup some traffic shaping, and so long as you aren't doing a lot of serving across your 384k upstream bandwidth, I'd imagine the downstream would easily scale to close to 100 employees for email, and heavy web usage.
My only point is that perhaps there's some optimization or configuration that could be done to make the most of the current connection.
Alternatively, it's possible your usage patterns are considerably more demanding than ours and you do need to up your downstream bandwidth.

Best of luck,
David

Tony Spencer wrote:


Funny. I was just giving our rep a hard time about this a
couple of days

ago. She agreed that their pricing structure was outdated
and she says they

have been discussing lowering it but seems to me that they
need to come down

A LOT. This is why I'm looking at the Speakeasy OneLink
6Mx768k for a

fraction of the price that TW is asking.
TimeWarner's real problem is that they don't offer a
solution for small

business who want more downstream but don't need 2Mbps upstream.



-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Czeiszperger [mailto:michael AT czeiszperger.org] Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2005 5:39 PM
To: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
Subject: [internetworkers] connectivity choices for small business?

I was wondering if the choices for internet connectivity have changed at all recently? The 3Mx384 connection from TimeWarner has seemed slow now that I've added some more employees, and I went
looking to
increase the service level. What I got back was this puzzling list of prices.

3Mx384k for $89.95/month
2Mx1M for $199.95/month
2Mx2M for $299.95/month
4Mx2M for $399.95/month
6Mx2M for $499.95/month

The cost differential from going from $89.95/month to
$199.95 seems
to make it not worth it, but are there any options? These seem expensive, but the performance still seems higher than DSL, and cheaper than one of the T's.
______________________________________________________________
__________ _________

You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so
unfair. Then
I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and
all the
terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe. - J. Michael Straczynski



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