Re: Bandwidth Customer ratios

Jeff Woods ( jeff@delta.com )
Thu, 11 Dec 1997 18:08:41 -0500

I believe it all varies based on your usership, and you shouldn't put a
hard, fast number on it. If you can feed 150 "ports" on a T-1 and not
saturate the T at peak usage, then do so! If you can only support 60
users because most are download hogs or using video on demand, time for a
new T, in spite of that 96 recommendation (which seems to me to be based on
a HORRIBLE ratio... A T-1 is ABOUT 28 56k modems, or about 46 33.6k modems.
Now, I don't know about YOU, but let's assume everyone's using 56k
(unrealistic -- 33.6k is FAR more common, even now). Let's assume some
overhead, and call that 24 concurrent downloads at 56k. Are ONE in FOUR
of your customers doing a SUSTAINED download at any given time? Not
here, they're not.

At 05:36 PM 12/11/97 -0500, you wrote:
>-> A silly question for someone,
>-> Has anyone found out a decent formula for figuring out how much
bandwidth is
>-> needed to provide a decent service to "X" amount of dialup customers?
Other
>-> than the obvious phone call stating "Man downloading is sooo slow?" I
>-> haven't figured out a really good way of telling. I have to factor in a
>-> nominal number of webpages that we host also. Any kind of generic tips or
>-> thoughts would be helpful.
>
>Boardwatch magazine printed an article a while back and I believe they
>suggested 96 dialin lines per T-1 of bandwidth into the Internet. This of
>course whas when we were using 33.6kbs modems, not ISDN and 56k series
modems.
>
>
>
>Jeff Binkley
>ASA Network Computing
>
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