Bandwidth Questions
I have an MPLS (3MB) network at my business. It serves as my connection to 3 locations (HQ, Site A, Site B). Coming into the HQ, I have a T1 (1.5MB) internet connection. I then pass the internet from HQ through the MPLS network to provide internet connectivity to Site A and B. This setup has always worked, but has never been referred to as fast. My current contract for this T1 internet service will expire soon. The sales rep suggested I bond a few T1’s together to fix the speed issues. To me that sounds great, but the price is almost tripled.
The internet is not really used for recreation; it mostly transmits email from my in-house exchange server as well as process credit card payments.
I would like to know if buying an extremely fast cable connection (30MB+) would be sufficient enough for reliable business. It would serve a maximum of 100 PC’s (all 3 locations). Of course, this connection would also have a static IP.
I understand that Site A and B would be bottlenecked by the 3MB MPLS connection, but all the internet related transactions would ultimately be processed at HQ before being sent to the internet.
Would any of you recommend this setup?
The internet is not really used for recreation; it mostly transmits email from my in-house exchange server as well as process credit card payments.
I would like to know if buying an extremely fast cable connection (30MB+) would be sufficient enough for reliable business. It would serve a maximum of 100 PC’s (all 3 locations). Of course, this connection would also have a static IP.
I understand that Site A and B would be bottlenecked by the 3MB MPLS connection, but all the internet related transactions would ultimately be processed at HQ before being sent to the internet.
Would any of you recommend this setup?
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+1 for using cable internet with 2nd backup connection - pared with a router to support the multiple connections.
SLA's on slow a$$ T1 lines don't mean much these days...the fine print...you typically get financially compensated for the cost of the connection during the outage, but that doesn't help cover the cost of lost business and productivity.
SLA's on slow a$$ T1 lines don't mean much these days...the fine print...you typically get financially compensated for the cost of the connection during the outage, but that doesn't help cover the cost of lost business and productivity.
There are many factors that affect perceived network performance. Latency can be really important, but it's something that is hard to talk about because it's harder to measure and specify than bandwidth. I often have people complaining about the network being slow and when I check the interfaces they are nowhere near to saturating the link, in which case bandwidth isn't the problem. Bonding T1 or other technologies may or may not help. My general experience is that my cable conenction will go down for no reason at all frequently enough (a few times a month perhaps) that I would be concerned if it was the only connection I had. Fortunately it's my backup connection and I have conenctions setup so that we generally only know about a WAN outage because of specialized monitoring telling us that there's a problem. If you have a dual WAN router, a cable and DSL connection should provide better combined uptime, bandwidth, and pricing over your existing T1. Latency could be better or worse. With dual WAN solutions you need to have some way to handle incoming connections over either WAN interface, because you can't use the same public IP for both WAN carriers. What I do is have my DNS provider monitor my primary IP addresses. If they are unavailable, it switches my DNS entries to the static IPs on the secondary WAN connection. It then changes the DNS back to the primary addresses when they become available again.
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My new internet connection is working 1000x times better than I've expected! For me, this cable connection was definitely the right solution to my issues.
> almost always asymetrical. Meaning you may get 30M download and only 1.5-3M upload. In addition
> the reason you pay more for the business connections is because you are are paying for service and
> SLAs that they provide you.
Yes, they are asymetrical, but for Cablevision, my ISP, it's a 30 Mbit down, 5 Mbit Up line - which 20x faster down and over 3x faster up. And it costs $75 per month for 5 static IPs and that speed. Bump that up by $25 and your speeds get astronomical at 101 down and 20 Up (maybe 30).
As for reliability and SLAs... T1s are nice in theory because they come with SLAs... tell that to one of my clients who had their T1 fail on a weekly basis WITH an SLA... that disrupted their business seriously and the SLA basically said they got a discount on their T1. Hardly impressive.
Today, they have Cablevision and FiOS with a Fortigate router that provides redundancy over both lines. For about HALF what the T1 cost them before, they have two different technologies providing high-speed internet so a problem with one almost certainly doesn't have the same root cause as the other.
Frankly, I'm not sure how this would work on an ecommerce site, but also, considering the costs required to maintain a credit card payment system up 24x7 which it should be, I would never recommend hosting it in-house.