Re: Bandwidth Customer ratios

Jeff Woods ( jeff@delta.com )
Thu, 11 Dec 1997 18:27:18 -0500

I think you misunderstood me -- I'll oversell the bejeezus out of a T-1 so
long as its not saturated. If my average customer profile is one who does
nothing but look at standard web pages and read Email, with the RARE
download, and I can get away with 200 ports on a single T-1, and saturate
that T-1 only to about 75% at peak, then I'm damn well going to do it, and
save the cost of a second T-1. But as soon as I see peaks above 75%
(PEAKS, not sustained usage) over 80%, then its time to add more capacity.

At 03:18 PM 12/11/97 -0800, you wrote:

>I'm with you, I don't like "shorting" bandwidth, which is what happens when
>you say you can fit 96 33.6's on a T, because that is way over the total
>bandwidth available...
>
>At 06:08 PM 12/11/97 -0500, you wrote:
>>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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>>>
>>>
>>
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