Were do you guys have your T1’s installed? Do you bring all your bandwidth into your local office and then backhaul it to the towers with your access points or do you have them installed right at the tower?
We are having some issues with pricing on our T1’s, we are in a very rural area and they are about $775 per T1’s and a DS3 is just about ridiculous.
Also for a 250 customer subscriber base (including ranchers) how much bandwidth would you recommend if our main plan will be 256/128, but we will allow busting up to the full connection rate.
Thanks,
Ben Anthony
Slightly off topic but here in Africa we get our bandwidth straight to our office via VSAT. We pay approx US$1600 for 256k/768k. :?
What sort of ping times do you get over that vsat?
We are in a semi rural area, so we get our bandwidth from a place about 10 miles away and use a canopy 20mb BH to bring it to our tower.
We bring ours to our office and backhaul. We use actual backhaul kits for long shots (over 10 miles), and we are using a 5.7 radio with an omni for a few of our closer AP sites. All our clients are on 900MHz (completely flat and very heavily treed here).
If you go with T’s, then bring them to the head end and distribute from there. This way you can aggregate multiple T’s and don’t overload one, and under-utilize another.
I would encourage you to look at trying to find bandwidth from a nearby city that you can wireless to your network. Without local loop you can get raw BW pretty cheaply these days.
If you got a 3M to 5M connection for 800/mo (remember, no local loop so it could be less) that would be 500/mo cheaper. Take 500 x 24 months and that’s $12k you could use for BH equipment. 12k could buy you two Moto or four Trango Atlas links or you might even find some used links at a great price. You could get a line of credit and hang on to your cash for operations.
You will still spend roughly the same money per month as the 2 T’s, but you could end up with more BW, and the connection would be scalable so as you grow you can just call your provider and ask for more. When the lease ends, your costs go down and that just may line up with needing more BW. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Re BW req’d you need to make some assumptions. For example:
- 60% will be on at one time. 250 x .6 = 150
- 256k x 150 users = 38.4Mbps
- Assume 20:1 oversubscription rate = 1.92Mbps
I would say 2Mbps might be the answer or a pair of bonded T1’s. We had 80 users in a mix of 750k, 1000k, and 1500k on a single T1 before it choked.