How much BW for Internet do I need for 200 nodes?

[dimpals]

How much Bandwidth for Internet do I need for 200 nodes in a company?

Is there a formula I can use?

Currently, I have a T1, I know I need to upgrade since it is very slow, but don't know to what? ....2T1 or 3T1?

 

[chipk]

It depends on what you're using the Internet for. Mostly downloading, uploading, or just surfing? Also, slowness to the Internet doesn't automatically call for an upgrade of your pipe. Are you sure you've eliminated other possible problem areas? For instance, I have a 2610 router at a remote site that didn't have fast ethernet, so could only do 10 Mb speed on the link to the switch. It ended up negotiating to 10/half and gave the appearance that there were problems with the circuit when in fact there were just a ton of collisions and errors resulting in a lot of retransmissions, etc. Setting it to 10/Full remedied the problem.

 

[robertjo24]

One item of interest on this…
Do you host your own email in house and do your own spam filtering?

We found that a great deal of our internet bandwidth utilization (60-80%) is inbound spam. We filter it in house so it does not get to the user, but still, it clogs our available pipe.

We are looking into having our new ISP filter spam prior to our office.

 

[chipk]

Another thing to consider is if you don't have a Proxy/Caching server, you may want to get one. Squid is a free proxy server that runs on *nix.

http://www.squid-cache.org.

My general thinking is that Internet connectivity is like hard drive space, mailbox limits, and every other limit: whatever you give your users, they will use all of it. Increasing that limit will only allow them to max out the increased pipe.

You could also look at some traffic prioritization using ACLs and policy-map.

I guess the point is, there are a lot of low-cost, and even free, ways to get the most out of your bandwidth.