1

Hello,

Currently I am using a 50/5 broadband connection for ~100 users and it works well. Due to some company wide changes I’ve been asked to change to a 10MB Symmetrical service. Anyone have any knowledge as to how these two compare? Am I going notice performance degradation? Should I push for the 20MB Symmetrical service? At this point I am only in need of Internet access although down the road I may utilize data replication, thus the move toward a symmetrical link. I appreciate your input. Thank you.

DW

7 Spice ups
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We have no idea how much of your 50/5 you are utilizing, hard to say how much of a difference 10/10 would make for you, let alone if you should push for 20/20.

MB = megabytes

mb = megabits

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Usually 50/5 are shared Broadband offerings, which usually means that you have a contention ratio on your feed.

That contention ratio is how many other companies / users in the area you will be sharing a larger pipe with. Effectively at peak traffic times your internet access can be up to 1/10th of expected speeds. These will have been listed out in your contract when you signed up for it.

Usually a symmetrical service is unaffected by contention ratios as its dedicated to your company.

Effectively, and going out on a limb here, you should receive a more consistent internet access with a 10/10 service. However, if all your company is largely doing is downloading then there will be times where the 50/5 service will outperform the 10/10.

Sorry but need more info to be more concise!

4

Thank you both for your input. My mistake on the MB–fat finger typed that. Normally we get close to our expected speeds on the 50/5, sometimes better even–that varies daily but overall we have pretty good performance. The upload speed drops at times and I do expect we’d see better performance uploading, but most traffic is down vs. up. We are the largest business in our park so I wouldn’t be surprised if the few neighboring users have minimal impact on the available bandwidth. With that said I suspect that we may notice a slight drop in performance due to the difference between 50 & 10 but wanted to get some opinions from users who may be utilizing the 10/10 service.

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Losing 80% of your download capacity is likely going to be REALLY noticeable. I would notice that as a single user let alone as a company of ~100!!

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I would argue for 20/20 at a minimum. Like Scott suggested, losing 80% of your download capacity is going to create a bigger problem than the increase in upload will provide benefit.

Pardon the shameless plug, but if you needed a reference point for your management to justify the increase in bandwidth, this might help:

7

Like ranhalt says, it’s hard to give you an honest answer.

I’ve never needed more than a fully synchronous 10 meg circuit for any company i’ve been at (and that includes a 1000 user 6 site network)

However, as others have said 10 is a lot less than 50 - so it depends how much you actually use (or plan on using) that 50 meg.

if is it a case of you download occasionally, but it comes down really quickly then you could probably live with the decrease in speed

if it’s a case of your organisation is constantly and critically dependant on your link (cloud hosted everything for example) then you will notice it alot

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Hello Kenny8416,

I think we are going to stay with our 50/5 service for the time being. We have our email in the cloud so I do have concerns with that amount of drop in bandwidth. For the time being we are not replicating data etc. so uploads are quite minimal in comparison to the downloads, although that may come down the road. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it I guess. Thank you again for your input.