Internet Service Questions

airbornflght

Hi all,

I have some questions regarding internet service.

Right now our fraternity is served by a 12/1.5 cable connection. And while there is plenty of bandwidth it isn't terribly fast. And I has taken me a while to realize the difference. Our pings are generally in excess of 250ms. So web pages don't really 'pop' up. You sit at a white page for a second or two then it starts popping up.

Right now we pay close to $500 a month for our internet package.

My question is would it be beneficial to move to a t-1 type or fiber service? And what speed of service should I expect for $500 a month. T1 sounds great being tied into the pop, but 1.5 either way scares me for the fact that I'm serving 40 guys. As you can see on the graphs I have some problem users pegging the upstream all hours of the day. That's gotta get taken care of.

Any and all information you can give me is very appreciated because I am a little naive when it comes to how to go about getting this service and what to pay for a given ammount of bandwidth.

We have a 1 year contract with the cable company that will be up in the spring, and the cable internet is just not meeting my needs. Network lag is killing me.

kryyst

The big difference is that with a T1 you'll have a 1.5 meg downstream and a 1.5 meg upstream. More importantly it should have low latency which should give you much faster ping times. Also it should give you a tighter connection into a backbone so you have less hops to go through when you are trying to get anywhere.

But latency is the key here. I've recently been seing more ISP's offering much larger pipes, for little extra cost. What they don't tell you is that they are giving you higher band width, but at a much higher latency. The reason for this is that it doesn't have any impact on their system sure you get a bigger pipe but it's at a higher latency so on their end they aren't getting hammered any worse.

Think of it like an express way. Your 12 meg pipe is like a 12 lane highway. Sure you can have 12 lanes of traffic at once but it's going to be in bumper to bumper traffic almost the whole time. You get to speed up every now and then, but just as you turn the corner you have to throttle back down to avoid another traffic jam. Your T1 with low latency may only be a 2 lane highway but it's full open, almost no congestion and not a cop in sight. You just keep on driving 55mph the whole time.

airbornflght

So your saying a t1 connection would be fine for 40 users who also play video games?

And are there any ballpark costs? such as $/mb.

kryyst

A t1 should be fine video games don't hammer it much at all. We have branches that I work at with 40 users that surf and access databases all day long to our main branch and they only have 5 meg dsl connections. The biggest key for you will be to get a good firewall/router running that handles QoS properly.

$$$ wise I don't know what prices run in your area. I know where I am a T1 costs around $750 a month. By comparison we have a 6 meg bi-directional fiber channel for $1000 a month.

Just with any change you are considering get the details ask about latency bandwidth guarantees, availability guarantees and of course bandwidth overages. Get it in writing and see if they provide a trial grace period or even a 6 month contract.

airbornflght

So is T1 superior to a fiber connection in terms of latency? I always assumed they were two different ways to get the same connection. Am I wrong?

And as for routing right now we are using smoothwall, and it appears to be handling the work fairly well. Would that be subpar for our demands. Because we can't really afford cisco equipment, not to mention I don't know my head from my ass as how to configure those things. I never have liked the way cisco makes their hardware so hard to configure that you have to get training and then license each client if I'm not mistaken. And I don't know of any direct competitors to cisco.

kryyst

T1 is comparable to Fibber. It's usually more a question of what's available in your area.

Smoothwall is fine for what you need. Usually hardware boxes are more efficient because they have less overhead and are usually more stable in the long run because they are just an appliance with no moving parts. However for your needs you don't need it.

For what it's worth though HP, and 3Com offer comparable hardware to Cisco at a much lower cost and generally easier to work with. The advantage to Cisco is that Cisco hardware plays with other Cisco hardware very well and on higher scale networks there are some real advantages if you know what you are doing with the hardware. But yeah it's a bitch to work with if you don't have the training.

airbornflght

Well I think all that is available is a fiber loop, because back in 99 or so the city and a company invested around 3 million into a city wide fiber loop. Back in the day it was the most wired city in the states.

Cause we have a fiber bundle running into our house, all we need is a transceiver and all will work. We actually had fiber last year but I changed to suddenlink because it was a little cheaper and I was naive.

Now that I have the network sorted out I want it back so bad, but we signed a one year contract with suddenlink, so I'm stuck until the spring...

kryyst

Well looks like you have your answer then - fiber all the way.