Getting Your Internet Resources Under Control
By James Berbee and Scott Fields
Few things in life will go away if you ignore them. Internet bandwidth is one of them. Although Internet bandwidth varies widely in speed and expense, many companies treat it no differently than LAN bandwidth, which usually has fixed costs.
By learning to manage your Internet software and hardware properly, you may be able to save hundreds to thousands of dollars per month in connection fees and other networking expenses. Even if money isn't a critical issue, it still makes sense to get the most performance possible out of your Internet facilities. The key to a
ll of your bandwidth woes is understanding your system.
If your connection to the Internet backbone is insufficient, no amount of tinkering with your internal network will produce a lightning-fast site. If your equipment is configured haphazardly, a T3 connection will only serve as an exceedingly fast way to waste money. The right tools and a little legwork will lead you through the maze of Web hardware and software combinations to the one that will work best within your budget.
Unsafe at Any Speed
One of the first issues to tackle is the type of Internet connection you have or plan to acquire. Internet connections range from antiquated modems exchanging data at 14.4 Kbps, to full-time T3 dedicated lines that run at 45 Mbps. The former is inadequate for almost any user, and the latter is overkill for all but the largest, Internet-intensive companies.
Most organizations will find themselves choosing between ISDN connections and a full- or fractional-T1 connection. ISDN connections run at
64 Kbps or bonded at 128 Kbps and generally connect to the Internet service provider (ISP) only when incoming or outgoing communication is active. (This intermittence requires the specific network management strategies discussed below.) A typical, nondedicated ISDN i
nstallation will come in at under $200 with monthly charges in the $100 to $200 range. A full T1 connection is equivalent to two dozen 64-Kbps connections, for a total carrier capacity of about 1.5 Mbps. A fractional connection is one or more of the 64-Kbps increments. Installing a T1 connection--which, unlike ISDN, requires special telephone company hardware--will cost a few thousand dollars or more, and monthly charges will run between about $800 and $2,500. The link itself accounts for most of the expense. Once it is installed, the monthly fee increase for upgrading its bandwidth is usually modest.
Know Your Traffic Patterns
So how do you decide between the two? First determine if you'll be providing a steady stream of data to th
e Internet. If you are a data provider, you should have a fast outgoing connection (probably a full or fractional T1). That doesn't mean, however, that you need a T1 connection for a simple Web site (even a popular one). Your ISP can host your site, saving you the expense of a T1 or T3 link. If you are providing data updates frequently (such as stock prices), or if you host an FTP site, you'll need a fast connection.
If you are primarily a data consumer--your users most often send and receive e-mail, subscribe to just a few news groups and occasionally access Web sites--then you can get by with an ISDN connection. ISDN connections are about as fast as the permanent connections used by most Internet sites. Compared with T1 connections, they have higher latency (the time an Internet packet takes to make the trip from your server to a remote site and back). Each round-trip request sent on an ISDN will be 20 milliseconds (ms) to 40 ms slower than on a T1, reducing the apparent speed of Web surfing.
A sing
le ISDN port can provide Web connections for 20 or so nonconcurrent workstations, while maintaining satisfactory performance. To make an ISDN connection pay, your organization's total network connection time should average less than four hours daily. That means you'll have
to batch most functions. You should have e-mail sent to your ISP rather than directly to your server, so that you can download it in batches.
For many users, a single ISDN port just isn't fast enough. The site of one of our newer academic customers was performing so slowly that the customer called in a consultant, who convinced the client that its 30-node Ethernet network had to be segmented. Had the consultant compared the client's Ethernet load, which we found running at between 5 percent and 10 percent capacity to the ISDN load, (about 90 percent of capacity), the client wouldn't have wasted the time and money on modifying its internal network. A partial T1 connection was the solution.
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