Is 40Mb enough?

[Edu-IT]

Concurrent user connection is at most about 100.

 

Is 40Mb going to provide sufficient enough bandwidth for VLE, MyMaths and other typical usage within the classroom? Onsite email server too.

 

Need opinions on this. While 60 through to 100 Mb is option I'm not sure it's *really* needed or gling to be utilised.

 

Any school out there running a similar connection for a greater amount of concurrent users without issue?

[teklogic]

Hi, we are very similar and running a 30mb line. We do have awoke qos on the firewall. This allows the staff to take priority and then the students, we do slow the connection for students streaming videos etc.

[Edu-IT]

Everything runs okay for you then I assume?

[teklogic]

Yes, everything is fine. We use to experience some problems until the qos. We discovered the students were using all the bandwidth on hd YouTube videos.

[ITGURU]

I am currently doing a Layer 3 Cross Forest migration internally due to the merge of our 2 schools joining next door to each other. Have installed a fibre link between the 2 sites to avoid the need of county involvement. We hit out 40 meg limit regularly. Once the networks are joined our feed is to be uncapped up to 100meg to support the additional users going through our internet.

 

Originally they were going to Bond the 2 x 40meg connections but are now apparently going to uncap the line.

 

Teklogic - Is that QOS on the county firewall or are you using QOS on internal switches?

[glennda]

how many client machines do you have? my last place with 900 desktop clients would sit at around 40-50meg all day.

[ITGURU]

850 computers , and when the networks are merged will increase to 1200.

[glennda]

850 computers , and when the networks are merged will increase to 1200.

 

100mb should be fine for that! I also used to run all the schools phone lines over our leased line which saved about 3k a year!

[teklogic]

 

 

Teklogic - Is that QOS on the county firewall or are you using QOS on internal switches?

 

I have a lightspeed rocket server working as a bridge to and from the leased line, all the qos is carried out as part of the content filtering.

[ITGURU]

What region are you in?

We are behind county Netsweeper filtering.

[teklogic]

Norfolk, we have stopped the county connection in favour of our own solution.

[glennda]

What region are you in?

We are behind county Netsweeper filtering.

 

We also dumped our lea's offering and went with our own line and a smoothwall. You need Smoothtraffic for QOS features I believe although you might be able to do user qos in the web proxy settings.

[synaesthesia]

We have 40mbit with EMBC currently and we barely touch it tbh. We host all our own services. Moving to a different supplier with 50mbit but with prices are they are atm, should finances not have been quite as bad we'd have probably gone for 100 to keep things nice and futureproof but with a 100mbit bearer anyway the upgrade is a cinch. If anyone actually uses 40/50MB without having a remote site to care for (we do but its close by and have a separate gig link to it) I'd be interested to know what for. Only big use I could see is remote or, ugh, "cloud" backup systems.

[bossman]

We host all our own services which include:

 

e-mail

Remote access

Website

VLE

Run Youtube througout

 

350 clients and over the past 4 years have never been above 6mb so we run 10mb on a 100mb bearer for future proofing.

 

We don't have voip as yet, all our phones are still analog but looking to go down the soft phone option in the near future, this may mean an increase in bandwith but will measure this beforehand.

 

I would think 40mb is fine for what you require.

[twin--turbo]

We had 100Mb, was a total waste. Stats showed we were maxing near 20Mb but we went to 40Mb for safety.

 

That's for 2 Schools one with ~1000 users other ~500. 800Devs one site 500 on the other.

 

 

If the users are all downlaoding ISO's , DVD's Rips, Torrents and other junk then sure 100Mb will be needed. If you have good filtering, a decent cache and other security then the above should not be comming in.

 

Rob

[bossman]

 

If the users are all downlaoding ISO's , DVD's Rips, Torrents and other junk then sure 100Mb will be needed. If you have good filtering, a decent cache and other security then the above should not be comming in.

 

Rob

 

If they were doing the above then I would expect to lose my job for being totally incompetent and actively encouraging the students and staff to break the law.

[Edu-IT]

I have Cacti graphs which show current usage, but to be honest I'm not sure I fully understand them! Anyone help me decipher them? That'd probably be a good place to look right?

@bossman If you cope on 10 Meg I question whether 40 Meg is too much!

[GrumbleDook]

We have secondaries using between 15-50 meg on a regular basis ... and a few who were uncapped during some testing did peak at 70 but it was very rare.

 

Hosting things in-house will reduce bandwidth requirements.

 

When looking at other things that can affect it we do tend to find that schools with local filtering / firewall use less bandwidth ... but we also find the same with those who take more control of the RBC provided filter too ... so the key is taking control and better management of filters makes the difference ... not where the filter is situated.

 

Working with some schools further south (schools not on an LA or RBC connection) I did find that a good chunk of traffic on a heavily - loaded connection was down to poor management of firewalls, with poor documentation over a few years leading to gaps which a number of staff and students had discovered (and shared with each other) being able to use P2P software, video and audio streams, and a lot of scavenging of manga comics!

[bossman]

@Edu-IT:

 

The more you put out to the cloud the larger your bandwith requirements and that is why I have kept everything in house for the moment.

[john]

We have 250 desktops on a 10 link at present and can sit happily up to that most days, and we host VLE for 5 other schools, in-house mail, website, own filtering etc.... and its sitting up there so we have ordered the next size up which is 100 for our LA, strangely annoying yes but that is what it is its 10 to 100, 50 would have been fine for us.

[bossman]

@john:

 

Thats the reason why I ditched our last ISP for one with flexibility and that was BT so we can go up in stages of 10mb a time.

[john]

@john:

 

Thats the reason why I ditched our last ISP for one with flexibility and that was BT so we can go up in stages of 10mb a time.

 

When I'm not picking up the tab for it, the LA is, I don't mind too much The LA have accepted that its not good going forth as there are a few of us that want a bit more than 10 but not 100 and there contract with the WAN firm doesn't allow anything other than those 2 at the top end, the new contract with them will allow a range, I think from the last chat I had they were doing 1,2,4,10,20,50,100 for the new one to allow much more flexibility for schools to choose waht is needed, so longer term I suspect we will drop from 100 to something lower, especially when I am having to pickup the entire bil which will be a couple of years away when the funding reserves from the HT Grant etc finally run out (our LA banked them an are releasing them over the next few years to subsidise the ISP contract.

[glennda]

@john:

 

Thats the reason why I ditched our last ISP for one with flexibility and that was BT so we can go up in stages of 10mb a time.

 

Having been speaking with ISP's this last few weeks for various customers a lot of them are just offering 100mb lines now in built up areas (i've been looking around Central London - Bridge, Bank that sort of area). And instead of capping the speeds they just apply fair usage. I think they are starting to realise in some places that they have to pay for a 100mb cable so whats the point in throttling it down. For most users that won't need a full 100mb line it does give the flexibility when needed to peak to the higher speeds.

[bossman]

@glennda:

 

How lucky for you that you are in our great capital................London where the pavements are paved with gold and all the rest of the country have to scrimp and save for the scraps which it throws from its table.

 

How lucky you are to live in the Capital and work there were "fair usage" is the keyword of the day as far as ISP's in London are concerned, why is this you ask? Is it because they are fleecing the Northern part of the country who don't have the infrastucture to support cheap broadband connectivity?

 

Well the divide just gets bigger and bigger doesn't it?

 

I'm really pleased that you only have to pay for fair usage as we have to pay £8.5k per annum for 10mb and our school is pushed to pay that but we require it, I have seen how London schools tend to fair in the grand scheme of things and they fair a lot better than those schools up North believe me.

 

Well thats my rant for the night, I bid thee all a goodnight

[glennda]

@glennda:

 

How lucky for you that you are in our great capital................London where the pavements are paved with gold and all the rest of the country have to scrimp and save for the scraps which it throws from its table.

 

How lucky you are to live in the Capital and work there were "fair usage" is the keyword of the day as far as ISP's in London are concerned, why is this you ask? Is it because they are fleecing the Northern part of the country who don't have the infrastucture to support cheap broadband connectivity?

 

Well the divide just gets bigger and bigger doesn't it?

 

I'm really pleased that you only have to pay for fair usage as we have to pay £8.5k per annum for 10mb and our school is pushed to pay that but we require it, I have seen how London schools tend to fair in the grand scheme of things and they fair a lot better than those schools up North believe me.

 

Well thats my rant for the night, I bid thee all a goodnight

 

I'm afraid I'm not that lucky!!! I don't live or work there! - this if a few clients I have there which happen to be with hundreds of meters from an exchanges. Where I was previously was out in the sticks and we got a 100Mb line from M247 for about 12.5k which wasn't bad for the location (BT wanted 24k, Easynet wanted 18k and Talk Talk about 16K).

 

It does help on the location and even in central london you can struggle. The same client that got offered a 100mb leased line with fair usage struggles for get 1Mb on an ADSL line which they use on guest wireless. They are less then 800m from an exchange which is completely geared for Leased line (being in a Financial district). The ADSL infrastructure isn't up to par and probably won't be improved for a long time!