How much bandwidth does a business really need?

[timeshifter]

How much bandwidth do you really need for an Internet connection?

This has never been a difficult question for me and my clients as there was almost no choice. One of my largest sites is now being asked to upgrade.

They have 25/25 fiber. 40+ computers, IP phones, some medical imaging modalities with images stored locally and backed up to cloud in the background. They have a Datto backup appliance. Also have a backup 200/10 cable connection where some devices are routed through and it acts as a failover.

Three years ago when they got the fiber and went to IP phones around the same time the business was smaller. Maybe half as many PCs and phones. However, except for maybe one instance every 4-5 months were something will overload their bandwidth, they operate just fine on the 25/25. Much of their work is local and very little day to day stuff using the public Internet.

Here's the pricing being proposed

speed / price per month
25 379
50 549
100 699
200 899
500 1199
1000 1399

Here's their usage history graph from their Meraki firewall

My gut says get them on 200/200 as I think it would be a good fit, but it's hard to justify, and that's $2,400 per year more than the 100/100, etc. etc.

Any guidance on how to approach this? The owner will more or less go with what I recommend, so I want to be responsible with his money.

 

[Markverhyden]

First thing I'd ask is what do they envision the future to be. How much growth might they be able to absorb in the existing office space?

My gut feeling is 100/100 should do them fine, including absorbing some growth. And make sure they understand that the WAN is different than the LAN. You know the drill. Customer gets a faster ISP connection and the next thing you hear is "everything is still so slow". A great idea would be to put in a wire shark box to separate WAN packet count from LAN packet count. But you'd need a switch which supports port mirroring so you can copy all traffic to the port that has wire shark attached.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Doesn't look like they're using all that much.

I see "medical imaging"...so I'm thinking medical office, and I'm thinking multiple servers.
I see "Datto" mentioned....so you're backing up, including office. How much is being backed up each night? How long are those daily incrementals taking to upload? Is the queue for offsite backup bloated?

IP phones...what is being done to separate that? Keeping call quality.

But you can leverage that firewall and shift a good amount of the traffic over to the cable connection, if not at least the Datto backups...alleviating the main fiber pipe of that traffic that's probably still going on in the morning.

A good firewall with good QoS features can take small bandwidth and make it run pretty smooth for a network. Many years ago I had an accounting office...on Microsoft 365 for email, on a 3 meg bonded T-1 pipe. Ran pretty smooth for years!

 

[Sky-Knight]

Bandwidth is infinite, it's only limited in the moment.

So you size based on how long you want that moment to last when the congestion appears. The total speed doesn't matter... what matters is how long a process takes to complete, and how long that process is making a human wait.

Your investment is directly targeting time lost by a human performing a task.

Given the way the US is wired... in most cases anything over 200mbit is a waste of money. That only changes if there are enough people at the site to justify it.

 

[Metanis]

Another factor would be the ease in which the service can be upgraded and/or the length of the contract lock-in.

 

[timeshifter]

Another factor would be the ease in which the service can be upgraded and/or the length of the contract lock-in.

I had asked about that and it seems pretty simple. He said "Yes, during your agreement you would be able to move up or down as your needs change after you upgraded. Meaning, if you upgrade to a 50Mbps, then want to upgrade to 100Mbps, we can upgrade it and it will keep the current agreement in place, and vice versa. We can assess during that time of course when you need to change up/down."

 

[lcoughey]

For my data recovery lab, we have 100M business fibre and it is perfect for us. Yes, from time to time, having a faster upload for clients to access their data would be nice, but I'm not going to pay an extra $200/month just to get to 150M..$430 for 100M is expensive enough.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@lcoughey If you need to push data any harder than that, you're better off sending it to a cloud service anyway. Your clients aren't likely to realize any additional performance just due to how the different ISPs are peered. Though if they're on the same ISP as you things are quite nice!

 

[cypress]

I wouldn't do anything less than 100/100 on fiber. But assessing their needs, especially with VOIP involved is crucial.