Create a better network for an area with bad options?

[AlexanderCS]

We're in a small town such that unless you're in the downtown core, your speeds are not decent. In the surrounding area, you're lucky to ever push into the double digits. More often than not your speed is 2 to 5 down.

This is an issue I'm having with a construction company. They're using Bell DSL and get about 5 down. Not a problem when two people are in the office Googling. When they have 5-6 guys in though, it gets bogged down. Is there anything that can be done to increase the speed and if so what's the best way to go about it?

The one guy there attempted to add a second modem/router (a combo, the Bell Hub....) so as to spread out the connections by having two networks. The problem with that is, they all need access to the Synology on site which is sitting on the first network.

Any thoughts?

 

[Matthew Bradley]

Most dual WAN routers support load balancing. Ubiquiti would be a good option. One network with 2 WAN interfaces - problem solved.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

What are 5-6 guys doing which bogs down a 5 or 6 meg pipe? I've had much much larger offices share a 6 meg pipe..even a 3 meg pipe..heck even a standard 1.5 meg T-1 in an office of 15 or so.

You can get multi-WAN routers that will "load balance"...multiple WAN connections.
Some good UTM firewalls have excellent QoS/bandwidth management features to ensure important types of traffic get prioritized..and less important types of traffic go to the back of the line.

 

[Markverhyden]

Check with their ISP to see if they offer channel bonding with the DSL.

 

[Matthew Bradley]

I'm guessing they don't. Our town of ~15k didn't have channel bonding until about a year ago. Comcast gobbled up so much of Windstreams user base they didn't have much of a choice.

 

[marley1]

P2p from something else?

 

[AlexanderCS]

What are 5-6 guys doing which bogs down a 5 or 6 meg pipe? I've had much much larger offices share a 6 meg pipe..even a 3 meg pipe..heck even a standard 1.5 meg T-1 in an office of 15 or so.

You can get multi-WAN routers that will "load balance"...multiple WAN connections.
Some good UTM firewalls have excellent QoS/bandwidth management features to ensure important types of traffic get prioritized..and less important types of traffic go to the back of the line.

We're talking megabits, correct? If so I don't know how an office of 15 managed with 1.5.

Here if you've got one person using Quickbooks Online, 4 guys doing this and that one the web, a guy one Youtube and all of them with email open (and probably even their phones connected), it'll slow to a crawl.

I'm going to give the Dual WAN with load balance a try. Will this work even if it's just the one ISP on two lines?

Mark, I'll also ask about channel bonding--I doubt it, but worst case they say no and that's that.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

An old T-1...yup...1.5 mbps.
Yes Slowbooks Online is heavy. And personal things like video streaming from youtube suck up bandwidth. That's what nice about UTMs...they can really deprioritize personal internet goofing off things like youtube or pandora users...so that actual business traffic can continue at usable performance.

How far away is the Comcast? Pipe in some fast internet if you have towers available or line of site from some height.

 

[trevm999]

I've seen an office of 50 people use a 5Mbps connection. The router being used, and setting up QoS can make a big difference. Look at what their bufferbloat rating is http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

 

[putz]

The first thing you are going to want to do is identify key services and create some QoS rules to prioritize on your firewall. Most modern business class firewalls should support some type of bandwidth management. Doesn't matter how much more bandwidth you can get if you have people abusing it, then its always going to be slow. Even better if your firewall supports L7 filtering, then you should be able to identify applications on your network using your bandwidth and limit them accordingly. You'd be surprised on how little bandwidth you can work with once you start managing network flows. Another suggestion would be to setup some type of web proxy/cache. This way common files are cached locally reducing your overall bandwidth usage for web browsing.

 

[Patch22]

I've seen an office of 50 people use a 5Mbps connection. The router being used, and setting up QoS can make a big difference. Look at what their bufferbloat rating is http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Not heard of bufferbloat before!! This discussion is interesting for me as a lot of my work is to rural locations with speeds similar to those here. One thing I've seen is that any cloud desktop applications such as DropBox, GoogleDrive etc can cause trouble with a small upload pipe. I've seen inefficency uploading also affecting download bandwidth as well..these clients seem to struggle on slower connections.

 

[ZenTree]

Check with their ISP to see if they offer channel bonding with the DSL.

From my days working for an ISP I would strongly recommend against channel bonding. It's a complete disaster to troubleshoot. You're best off doing the load balancing your side.

edit: I still wake up in cold sweats about a call to troubleshoot a 16 line bond, it was the call before I was meant to go home.. I think I had to put them on mute to bang my head against the desk.

edit2: Check the upstream first, if someone is saturating that then you need to address that before you look at the downstream.

 

[trevm999]

One thing I've seen is that any cloud desktop applications such as DropBox, GoogleDrive etc can cause trouble with a small upload pipe. I've seen inefficency uploading also affecting download bandwidth as well..these clients seem to struggle on slower connections.

edit2: Check the upstream first, if someone is saturating that then you need to address that before you look at the downstream.

This, without QoS in place, one person uploading pictures/files could cause everyone to effectively have no internet access.

 

[fencepost]

We have a couple of offices that have T-1s that are just waiting to end of contract to switch to cable modems (I say, just let the T sit there unused....) - one of them already with the order in place to go live later this month.

The thing that I see hammer those sometimes is that they all shut their machines down every night, so then they come in and updates start downloading. I'm working on getting them shifted over to more managed patching, but there's still some level of "Leave It On" battle.

 

[SAFCasper]

We are in a similar area. Majority of clients are 5-10Mb at best.

Combination of load balancing + QOS makes a big difference and doesn't cost the world. We use Draytek routers and have this setup for several clients.