Sharing a 100Mb pipe between multiple end companies?

[Five_Star]

The company I’m working for is possibly moving into a shared building that is being renovated. The owner of the building wants to attract digital companies and is having a 100Mb line installed (virgin media I think). Initially this line is going to be running at 20Mb, and we have requested 4Mb up / down. Other companies have requested other amounts mostly 2Mb and 1Mb up / down.

As we use the web quite heavily for hosting test sites, vpn links to other sites, web e-mail etc I had to attend a meeting from the building project co-ordinator to ask what our internet usage is, and how they proposed to distribute the connection.

It seems they are going to receive the 20Mb in and then give each company in the building one port on the router and limit the throughput on that port to their desired amount, 4Mb in our case.

Then will also be running QoS on the router, and have said they will be limiting certain protocols, mostly for p2p stuff.

I assume that with port based limit we could start the download of a large file, it flows down to the their router at 20Mb, then is buffered as our port only allows 4Mb through which is then passed onto our network gear. Surely this means we are using bandwidth that other companies have paid for and could need for their own essential services like vpn etc?

This doesn’t really sound like a good way to share out a connection of this type, especially since we are going to be paying quite a bit more than our current SDSL price for this service.

 

[Five_Star]

Yes, we’re not too happy about the filtering / restrictions on the connection. We do limit some p2p internally anyway, but the problem is I won’t know for sure exactly what they are doing until something doesn’t work I guess.

With regards to the bandwidth sharing, is this the correct way of implementing a share like this? We will only be happy if the end solution is like we had our own dedicated 4Mb pipe, regardless of other building use we should still have our 4M, is this true?

There is another meeting next week, what questions would it be worth asking about the implementation?

thanks

 

[Five_Star]

Thanks very much for the diagram Curiosityx it's much easier to see drawn like that. It all makes more sense now, much more than the guy in the meeting I attended who, I suspect, didn’t really know what he was on about.

That is actually one of our main concerns with the contract, they don’t really know what they are doing and have yet to appoint a real IT support company to look after the connection.

Now I’ve got some real information about the kind of setup they should be providing we’ll see what they come up with and if we’re getting a real support contract with them.

cheers