Good Downlink Percentage

I just started working for a company that has an older single 5Mb point to point Canopy connection already set up. Right now it is set to 85% Downlink. I’ve looked at the uplink and downlink stats and am just confused as I’m also new to this type of connection. How would I look at this data and be able to determine what the most effective downlink percentage setting would be? Tx Bytes has become a negative number so I’m assuming it’s hit a maximum value. 5Mb isn’t a super fast connection but it’s faster than the dial-up that they tell me we were using before. I just want to get the most out of this connection for as long as possible before needing to upgrade it to a faster solution. The speed itself is sufficient for the forseable future.

A little advice would be first find out what hardware version they are. You can do this by telnet into unit and type ver. What software version? this is on the status page. Update software on backhauls to 7.0.7 and you might even gain bandwidth out of them. Lets say that if they are 10Mbps backhauls with a good rf link your usable threwput would be about 7Mbps. The downlink % would mean that 85% of that 7Mbps would be allocated for download and 15% for upload. You can see this reflected on the link test page downlink rate and uplink rate. Another thing to look at on that page is uplink and downlink Efficiency. If you are below 90% you have a problem. On the stats page’s you dont want high numbers in areas like discarded packets or droped packets or anything that sounds negative. I am looking at a bh link that has been up for 2 weeks and on the uplink stats page everything has zero’s except RcvBytes, RcvUnicast Packet’s, and RcvBroadcast packets. Hope this helps you can download the user guide and it explains some of those values.

I believe the software version we’re using is 4.2.1. It’s something that’s been working for ages and they haven’t really done anything to update it. Why mess with what works right?

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll look at those stats and see what it looks like.

We are eventually going to need a faster link. Apparently they’re going to be putting more than the five computers that are out there some time in the future. Our requirements aren’t very network intensive but if you get too many computer going simultaniously on a 5Mb link things will get bad. Especially from the user’s perspective.