Internet bandwidth over broadband

[KeithFermor]

Our school (as part of the Kirklees education net) has a 10Mbit broadband service connection provided by a BT LES circuit. 'Our' pipe is shared, of course, with a number of other schools.

 

We do not receive any reports on usage or bandwidth availability, and its tricky establishing just what our daily skyline of bandwidth is.

 

I have tried several Internet bandwidth evaluations:

http://home.cfl.rr.com/eaa/Bandwidth.htm

http://www.beelinebandwidthtest.com/

http://www.dslreports.com/stest?loc=1

http://toast.net/performance/

 

the first of these gives multiple sites from/to which tests are undertaken. Some sites offer text or image downloads, some offer bothway testing.

 

I would be very interested to get some feedback from other educational site users (with a TOD stamp) on their received bandwidth access to/from the Internet.

 

Ultimately, it can only really give info on the slowest link of the connection and whatever share of the bandwidth is available during or outside 'normal' school hours.

[Geoff]

I'm in Lancashire here. Most of the primary schools runs off the local secondary schools connection. The primary schools get 2mbit SDSL broadband connections. The secondary schools get 100mbit fibre(?). The remaining primary schools that are unable to be serviced by DSL are running on ISDN (yuk) such as the one I'm at today.

 

In practice, the connections at the primaries run at reasonable efficency. I get around 160k/sec at a broadband primary and about 14k/sec at a ISDN primary. At the high school the limiting factor is usually the server one attempts to download from.

[ChrisH]

Us people up in the hills dont get any 100 mbit connections we just get ours through our dish on the roof from another high school. We point at the mast on the hill and that feeds the primaries. So all in all it's pretty dam slow.

At quiet times I have measured it at about 2 Mbit.

[MkII]

Is that microwave then Chris? - how do you get away with having it in the school?

 

We trialled Infra Red here for a while. It had a rated capacity of 115Mbt - but performance was badly affected by interference. Early morning fog [Welsh Valley], Birds, leaves. Come summer an old protected Oak on council property sprouted into leaf and we were as good as cut off. High winds blew it out of alignment - which saw me hanging from the flat roof of our 3 storey 6th form block adjusting the thing with my boss inside a window just beneath me pinging out. But other than that... If anyone is interested it's still there - maybe I should put it on ebay?

[Ric_]

I'm in Lancashire and our link is microwave too - 5.4 GHz variety. It's generally acceptable but by no means is it fast. There is also a tendancy for it to drop out in the afternoons.

 

Oh for a fibre link....

[spc-rocket]

Keith,

 

Use the pressaler router grapher to monitor your router. It will allow you to monitor one interface on the free version but the full version (up to 25 sensors) will only set up back £22. really good stuff and can work as a service on windows so can let it run overnight and all year if you wanted to. It will also show you ther daily, monthly, yearly charts as well.

 

How is you 10Mb delivered - one ethernet cable or aggregated serial lines??

 

Give it a shot. --> http://www.paessler.com/prtg

Check out the screenshots as well.

 

Ashok.

[Geoff]

I use Cacti running on a Linux box at school for this purpose.

 

http://www.cacti.net/

 

I also have setup ntop on the bridging firewall inbetween our network and the internet.

 

http://www.ntop.org/