25 pcs on a 2MB connection

XD-3

XD-3

XD-3

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Hi All

Just wondering if anyone could help me with this i need to set up 25 PC's on an Internet connection but its only a 2MB connection.

And i have no clue how to work out how much Bandwidth each system will actually have i no its going to be slow but need to no how to work out some figures

Any help would be great

Thanks
XD-3
 
tolien said:
Assuming they were all downloading at once, 2Mbps/25...
Click to expand...

so really i just need to devide 2MB between 25 ? if its that easy i should be banned from these forums :p :o

XD-3
 
XD-3 said:
so really i just need to devide 2MB between 25 ? if its that easy i should be banned from these forums :p :o

XD-3
Click to expand...

Guess you should be banned from these forums then lol.

nah, bandwidth is just split between how many workstations is active at once. If 2 machines were on only and both downloading they would get around 1MB each. Simple as that (Divide WAN speed by Amount of Machines)
 
They would get 8-9k/s download if all using it at once. I would say if they are using the web and email quite a lot you'll need to really boost this to 4 or 8mb.
 
It's a bit more complicated than this. For example, if one PC uses a download accelerator (such as FlashGet or Mass Downloader) to open up multiple threads then it could hog considerably more bandwidth.
 
I've seen plenty of small companies on 2Meg ADSL connections without any problems. If people want to connect in (vpn, webmail, etc) then that's another matter.
 
Yeah, I guess I wasn't completely clear: assuming all the machines were downloading at once, with a single connection, they'd get a (roughly) equal share of the available bandwidth (assuming the server each machine was downloading from was capable of supplying it).

You have to make loads of assumptions, or it all becomes horribly complicated.

Duouk2000 said:
2000/8=250kbps

250/25=10kbps
Click to expand...

250 and 10 kB/s, as in kilobytes per second.

nah, bandwidth is just split between how many workstations is active at once.
Click to expand...

Not quite. If a machine is on but isn't using the connection, the other machines don't lose out (the implication I got from what you said was that switching a machine on would reduce the available bandwidth).
 
My work place were only resently upgraded from 2mb to 8mb broadband, and we have over 200 pcs on site.

However make sure there is no download limit on the connection. As for routers just use a standard one and then connect it to a few switch.

If you're adding internet connectivety to an existing network, it'll almost certainly already have a DHCP server, so you'll need to disable the one in the router (or disable the existing one).
 
A shared 2mbit connection should be 'ok' for general web browsing etc; it's unlikely all the workstations would be active at the same time and 10-50k/sec isn't THAT bad for browsing.

I've used various shared 2mbit connections on a similar scale (netcafes etc) in the past and they aren't too bad for general net usage. That said these were proper 2mbit connections i.e. leased lines with 2mbit upload as opposed to ADSL/Cable which you may be talking about here.

One thing I would be wary of however is if you have any requirements for low latency (gaming/voip/ssh etc), it may be worth looking into traffic shaping to ensure these get priority.
 
If you saturate your upload it affects your download right? Because your computer still needs to upload some info in order to ask for packets etc?

What i would be saying if the above is true, is you wouldnt want to be doing much upload intensive otherwise your going to slow down your entire operation.
 
Where I used to work we ran 20+PC's off a bonded 128k ISDN connection, when all were in use it could lag quite badly but you have twice the uplink and 16x the downlink to play with. As you don't mention the intended usage it's pretty hard to guage if that's enough but for general http it's fine, if you start talking about streaming media or file downloads it becomes less attractive.
 
For web browsing in that situation a caching proxy and DNS server is a must and will really reduce the bandwidth requirements of each PC. Once a page has been fetched it is on the local cache so only the changes will need to be updated and if 2 users view the same page then only one copy needs to be downloaded.

As for the DNS, every time there is a DNS request it will leave your network unless you set up a local DNS server which will reduce network load.

A few years ago I used to use a 33.6 modem shared between 4 PCs/3 users. Most of the time you didn't notice it was being used, and the pages I vidited every day were pretty fast due to the caching. (images usually stay the same.)
 
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