[UCIMC-Tech] Re: [Imc] Today's Internet Outage

[Matthew Isaacs]

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 22:06 -0500, Stuart Levy wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 07:29:10PM -0500, dan blah wrote:
> > 
> > echo but for most all of today.  anyone want to donate a bunch of money
> > so we can get something better than insight to provide internet for the
> > several hundred users of chambana.net :)
> 
> What else is available?
>  
> I have mcleodusa DSL at home... it's not very fast (768/256kbps),
> but is reliable.  If you had more money, which services could you use?
> 

DSL is, in general, too slow for what chambana.net does, at least the
way that it currently does things.  AT&T has some new faster options
that may be viable (6.0Mbps down / 768Kbps up).  That however, is slower
than what Insight gives us.  According to Dan, the last time I asked,
Insight gives us 10Mbps down / 2 Mbps up.  Now, you have to figure that
only about 80-85% of those speeds are available due to overhead.
Typically with insight, when I've measured the actually throughput of
the line, we max out at 1.5Mbps upload.  Now, WRFU does streaming audo,
which, while the listeners don't connect directly, utilizes a good
portion of the upload bandwidth, 24/7 (I believe they use somewhere
around 192-256 Kbps, plus overhead).  I know of at least one other radio
station to do streaming audio (to a 3rd party server for the listeners
to connect to, just like WRFU) on comparable bandwidth and they had to
switch to a T-1 line as the cable line was not able to cope with the
load.

What Dan is suggesting around is obtaining some sort of dedicated
service, such as a T-1 (or several of these).  However, a single T-1 at
the lowest rate I've seen for the area is still over $300/month, plus
extra equipment that is need to interface to the circuit.  Additionally,
a T-1 only provides 1.5Mbps down / 1.5Mbps up, but is generally much
more reliable than any "consumer grade" service.  This may be sufficient
for upload chambana.net hosting, however it does not really buy us more
than the increased reliability.  The 1.5Mbps may suffice for general
office use, however I can not say that with certainty, as I don't know
how many people use the IMC internet connection, what they use it for,
and how much they use.  All of those would factor into whether 1.5Mbps
is sufficient.

Another alternative may be Volo.  They typically provide 3 Mbps down / 3
Mbps up, and are quite reliable.  OJC and several other business I know
of use Volo's service for their operations.  The downside to Volo is
that it is not an unmetered line, i.e. they charge you per Megabit of
traffic you send and receive (typically you purchase it in blocks).

The bandwidth issue can also be avoided altogether if chambana switches
all (or most) of its services to running on a host located in a
dedicated data center.  Depending on service options, etc, this runs
anywhere from $20 to $200 per month.

I hope this helps further the discussion.

--
Matt