Jollity Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 In choosing a new ISP, I need to come up with an estimate of how much the school is likely to download each month, as some of the ISPs I have been looking at have a download limit. Unfortunately I have no numbers from the current Internet connection as our current ISP manages the router. This is a primary school with about 60 devices and 100 full time pupils, we are moving from ADSL to FTTC which is estimated to give us a speed of 60MBps. I am thinking that 400GB per month probably would not be a problem for us, but I am not at all sure of that. Does anyone have any suggestions for coming up with a good estimate? Does anyone have any comparable figures they could share?
Steve21 Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 (edited) Without logging some real data you're going in blind tbh. Do you host videos internally? Do you let youtube used? Internal email? External email? BYOD? VPNs? VLE? If you take your 100 pupils, 400GB, That's 4GB per kid a month, or 130mb a day? If you're letting them download a lot, whether this is videos music etc that doesn't seem a lot. If it's general web browsing it's fine. (that's just on your pupil count, no windows updates/software etc) Steve Edited November 27, 2012 by Steve21 1
Jollity Posted November 27, 2012 Author Posted November 27, 2012 Without logging some real data you're going in blind tbh. Do you host videos internally? Do you let youtube used? Internal email? External email? BYOD? VPNs? VLE? Fair point, Steve. A big problem is that even if I could get some data, I am not sure if it would be that helpful because I think the usage patterns are likely to change considerably with the new ISP. In particular, we block youtube at the moment, but with the new connection we will have better filtering that supports YouTube for Schools, so likely will be allowing access to the children. I also imagine data downloaded will increase with a faster network speed.
CyberNerd Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 I think your calculations are off somewhere because if you allow 60Mb/s that is essentially 7.5 MB/s, or 450 MB per minute or 26GB per hour. I appreciate this is at absolutely full throttle - but if it is possible to use your months quota within 24 hours then you have either over specified the amount of bandwidth you need or under specified the total number of Downloads you require. I would suggest lowering the 400GB limit and dropping the amount of bandwidth. We have 800 school owned devices and upto 500 user devices with google apps, youtube enabled. We occasionally hit 30Mb/s. Our average bandwidth (download) over a 12 month period is 440kb/s.Which I make just over 100GB per month. 1
Geoff Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 Bandwidth is one of those things like memory, CPU power and disk space that you can seemingly never have enough of. I highly recommend you figure out some way of logging this. My personal preference would be a Linux machine running Squid with NTLM auth. That way you know who, what, where, when used your bandwidth. If you conduct this kind of data collection I suspect you'll find a few 'power' users that consume 90% of your traffic (I suspect IT support staff to be quite high in this list). You need to work out if it's legitimate traffic or otherwise too. Then you can come up with a number. A secondary concern is your internal servers/services. If you host anything Internet facing (websites, email, etc) then you need to take that bandwidth into account. You should be able to analyse the log and get a figure for this. Likewise if you have anything that pulls down a lot of data from the net on a regular basis, things like Email and WSUS are obvious candidates for this. 1
Steve21 Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 Fair point, Steve. A big problem is that even if I could get some data, I am not sure if it would be that helpful because I think the usage patterns are likely to change considerably with the new ISP. In particular, we block youtube at the moment, but with the new connection we will have better filtering that supports YouTube for Schools, so likely will be allowing access to the children. I also imagine data downloaded will increase with a faster network speed. General rule of thumb for streamed videos 1 minute standardish def = 2-3MB, high def = 5-6. (Yes this will change a lot depending on video/site etc), but if you consider one class of 30 pupils looking at a YouTube video at 5 minutes length HD. That's 30x5x5, so 750MB. Soon adds up And that's a fairly small video viewed once a day. Compare that 25MB video to the original 130MB per kid per day, and you see what I mean it's kind of impossible to ensure. 5 videos and a kids allocation gone Either way, as others mentioned generally it's a "Get most you can" or expect to limit videos etc Steve 1
Jollity Posted November 27, 2012 Author Posted November 27, 2012 I think your calculations are off somewhere The 400GB figure was just a guess pulled out of thin air, based on looking at the available packages from the ISP. The 60Mb/s is just the total available speed from the FTTC line. because if you allow 60Mb/s that is essentially 7.5 MB/s, or 450 MB per minute or 26GB per hour. I appreciate this is at absolutely full throttle - but if it is possible to use your months quota within 24 hours then you have either over specified the amount of bandwidth you need or under specified the total number of Downloads you require. I would suggest lowering the 400GB limit and dropping the amount of bandwidth. We have 800 school owned devices and upto 500 user devices with google apps, youtube enabled. We occasionally hit 30Mb/s. Our average bandwidth (download) over a 12 month period is 440kb/s.Which I make just over 100GB per month. Those are all very useful figures. Do you throttle the bandwidth for each pupil?
CyberNerd Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 Do you throttle the bandwidth for each pupil? No, but we do block large file downloads.
Jollity Posted November 27, 2012 Author Posted November 27, 2012 A secondary concern is your internal servers/services. If you host anything Internet facing (websites, email, etc) then you need to take that bandwidth into account. I think we are okay on this, as the website and email are hosted off-site. We have a VPN that SchoolBase, MIS uses to get data to the externally hosted web interface, but I think that will nearly all be upload. WSUS and the email access in school are something to consider. No VLE currently in use.
Jollity Posted November 27, 2012 Author Posted November 27, 2012 No, but we do block large file downloads. As a pupil then, what is the fastest rate I could download a file at your school?
glennda Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 I think we are okay on this, as the website and email are hosted off-site. We have a VPN that SchoolBase, MIS uses to get data to the externally hosted web interface, but I think that will nearly all be upload. WSUS and the email access in school are something to consider. No VLE currently in use. If your email is hosted off site you will also need to consider that for every attachment that is downloaded that will also add up! 1
CyberNerd Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 As a pupil then, what is the fastest rate I could download a file at your school? It depends on what what else is going on. On a normal day we have about 10Mb/s bandwidth free. I've not really got any precise measurements on that. I just keep an eye on the average and peak usages for capacity planning. 1
CyberNerd Posted November 27, 2012 Posted November 27, 2012 If your email is hosted off site you will also need to consider that for every attachment that is downloaded that will also add up! not on a google domain - it works out less bandwidth than hosting mail yourself
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