Internet Solution for College

[Dually]

I am a junior at Albion College and I am on the Tech Committee on Studnet Senate there. I am currently investigating expanding our internet connection. We currently have two T1s full access and they cost us about $25,000 a year EACH. We had one last year but I lobbied the administration for a second and we got it over the summer. Either way they are from a tier two carrier and they very bad, they are slow. Albion College is very wired, in fact 100% and we are the number seven wired private college in the nation and number one in Michigan. I am looking for a reasonable solution so that when we dump the two T1s we can get a great internet pipe. We have about 1,600 students that all have a ethernet in their dorm as well as labs.

Albion College Homepage

ideas?
thanks

 

[1KrazyFool]

Find a tier 1 ISP and get a T3? That would be pretty cool. Probably expensive though. In Wisconsin, the UW system pays $5500/Mbit, which is supposedly a fair rate for bandwidth. That would be around $250K/year for a T3. Our access is provided by Genuity.

 

[Vegito]

Get either 1 T3 from one provider and 1 from another or 2 from s ame provider with different NAPs as gateway, run BGP so if 1 dies, the other one still alive...

How much is ur budget anyway ?

suggest blocking napster & other mp3 stuff and content filters.. since you dont have much to work with.. u dont need some kid downloading MP3s while the rest of the group needs to work..

 

[Dually]

We can't afford a full T3 of course but maybe part of one so that would leave us a easy upgrade path. We do not have a budget for anything past $50,000 a year unless the Senate REALLY pushed for it, we are looking for a better service/contract. We made our contract back in 96' so that is why we pay so much.
We don't block mp3 files anymore but we do block napster. We stoped blocking mp3 files cause some class used them. We have bandwidth reg software that regulates bandwidth for mp3 files, max is 1/3 T1 usage.

 

[Hoober]

I'd shop around for a better ISP. How big is Albion? I'm in the ITS department for Colorado College and we currently have two T1's... and the network is slammed all the time (around 3000 users). We're currently in the process of adding another T1. A big part of your problem, it sounds like, is a worthless ISP. Shop around. See what sort of a deal different providers will cut you.

 

[Bloodstainedboots]

Is any type of XDSL an option here?
What if you broke up the Lan into diffrent segments.
Get 10 or so XDSL lines, split then up between the admin, doorms,
computer labs. What would be the down side of that? Get like a 1.5Mbps connection for each area.
What do you guys think of doing it like that?

 

[Bloodstainedboots]

With my idea you would need to use some sort of NAT program, like NAT32.

 

[spidey07]

Some kind of burstable T3 would be a nice fit. this way you get full DS3 clock rate but are only billed for your usage at say the 90th or 95th percentile traffic measured daily (nice if you have peak and off peak hours).

To keep the cost controlled invest in some kind of bandwidth manager (i love packeteer) or use the rate-limit functions of your routers.

 

[Buddha Bart]

My college has about 3,500 undergrads, and then some staff. Usualy there are about 2000 active nodes. We have a 9Mbps fractal T3 from Applied Theory.
It actually gets the job done quite nicely, but only because we have rather tough enforcement of our no-napster and napster like programs (gnutella, audio galaxy, cute mx, imesh, etc)
Sorry, I don't know how much it costs.

bart

 

[Bloodstainedboots]

so i guess my thought about multiple dsl lines was gay?

 

[bubba]

We have 2 T1's at the college I am at and we are 100% saturated 24hrs/day! Even with a packet shaper limiting napster traffic we still are saturated. We are moving to a fractional T3 now. We are going to get 6 Mb/s, but it is going to cost us $70,000/yr! The nice part about this is that as we need more we can just have them open up the fractional T3, but it will cost us, of course.

However, another thing we are realizing is that a disproportionate amount of bandwidth is taken by a small number of people. Getting them to cooperate (or forcing them to) will also go a long way to making the situation better.