figuring out bandwidth necessary

[Soybomb]

Today at work we were having a bit of a debate about how many users our T1 can adequately support before slowing down to modem like speeds. How many websurfing users should we be able to accomidate before it gets that slow? Any math to help me out? I've got some numbers here that I wrote up and we're arguing if they're correct or not
Thanks!

 

[ATLien247]

I would say 45-50, but I don't have a mathematical theorem to back me up.

Is this a full T1 you're talking about? Fractional? Burstable?

 

[piku]

A T-1 will allow 30 users access at 56k speeds (I rounded off to 50k because thats about what you get normally).

Now whether it would work out that way is another issue completley .



(edit: hit send too soon)

 

[Soybomb]

Full T1 direct to the local isp.
(i'm thinking our slowdown is due to their poor backend)

 

[BoberFett]

You can't just talk about number of users. What kind of traffic are they generating? Occasional web page downloads? Constant FTP downloads? Short uploads? Depending on usage, a T1 could support anywhere from 25 heavy modem users to several hundred light users simultaneously.

 

[ATLien247]

We have a full T1 where I work. We have 30+ users, about half of which are total Napster fiends. The other half use the internet moderately. FWIW, my average d/l rate is still around 40KB/s. It probably helps that we're only 3 hops from the backbone.

 

[Soybomb]

Lucky I'm like usually 8-10 hops from the backbone. 9 right now to the forums! Anyway most of them are just casual surfers loading webpages, I'd guess we'd have a a few napster fiends too, but not too many. Most of them wont have a clue what ftp is since it takes me a few minutes to explain to them how to reset their computer......

 

[IBhacknU]

Up until last month we had a fractional T-1 (256K) supporting over 100 workstations. It was just upgraded to full bandwith