I work at a small non-profit organization, with around 10 employees. We are an education non-profit and have around 100 students in our building every day. We are using the computers for multiple things, such as Google Earth/Mars, CAD software (Pro Engineer), accessing internet sites (NASA), etc., so we use our computers a lot. Lately, as we have added more activities that require the computer, our internet connection has been terrible as far as speed. We also use the internet for registration purposes with volunteers, and we've seen a big slow down there as well. I ran a test at www.speedtest.net and found that our average download speed is about 5.59 Mb/s (global average is 13.09 Mb/s) and our upload speed is 0.73 Mb/s (global average is 5.33 Mb/s). Are our speeds extremely slow? What would people recommend our internet speeds to be at with having 100 students using the computers each day and using programs that take up bandwidth?

Are our speeds extremely slow?

Yes. But that doesn't mean your capacity is low, it just means that at the time you ran the speed test, the pipe was bogged down. I'm guessing you didn't run the test when your machine was the only one active on the net.

What's the speed of your connection as a whole? Meaning, how does your ISP describe it in terms of download and upload capacity?

What would people recommend our internet speeds to be at with having 100 students using the computers each day and using programs that take up bandwidth?

That's hard to say since traffic generated really depends on their activity not the amount of people. Generally, the person responible for the network would use tools to determine what the avg and peak utilization is for your typical day. Based on that information, you would either adjust your bandwidth for the internet connection, or implement other solutions that can save you bandwidth such as proxy servers.

"deceptikon" - I was one of only a few people who were on their computers when I ran the speed test. Students weren't here yet and there were only about 3 employees here that were active on their computers.

"JorgeM" - the type of activity that they are doing, and most of the time it's at the same time, are things like being on Google Earth/Mars doing some research, going to a webpage where there are updates about the Curiosity Mars Rover, which you can find at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/curiosity/#229

As far as our staff, we use the computers when inputting student/teacher information into our database, which needs access to the internet and in the past few weeks, we've had many issues with having to unplug and re-plug our modem just to get the internet to work again.

This is what our Technology AOR manual says about our speeds: "ipHouse is our host internet service providers (ISP). Our current storage space is 700Mb; we have DSL 128m speed, 354 kbps." Does this give you guys any new information as far as where our speeds need to be for the type of traffic we have come through our building?

Thanks for the first responses!

5.5 is slow i would say anything you can get faster and the price is in your budget would be a benfit ,check with isp to see what they offer ,20 or 40 would be best if they offer that ,but 100 people on at the same time is going to slow down some what ever one you have

im on cable in Canada ,my isp offers 20-40-80 and 200 mbps

Does this give you guys any new information as far as where our speeds need to be for the type of traffic we have come through our building?

Unfortunately this isnt very helpful for me, other than knowing that your connection is asyncronous (your download is much bigger than upload). Without specific information about what you average and peak network utiliziation looks like, you'll end up doing what most people do...which is just to get bigger pipes. However, this doesnt address any issues if you have applications on your network being missued or unrestricted.

For example, on some networks especially that host students, the more bandwidth you have, the more ability to download multi-media content.

If you are sure that you dont have any problems with regard to misuse of bandwitdth, you can always just incrementally add more bandwidth and stop when the problem seems to be resolved. However, using this approach, you'll always be in a reactive mode when dealing with "slowness".

So the question really comes to...does it cost more to figure out exactly what you need, or is it cheaper to add more capacity.

Network speed depented may be on the your network provider.so Its soluation may be u know....

Network speed depented may be on the your network provider.so Its soluation may be u know....

upgrade

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