How many on a T1 2907

I know that roughly 96 dialup users can be hung off of one T1 line, but alas, we don't have broadband ISP's out here in the boonies. ;-)

(Yet! It might come this summer, if we get lucky.)

Currently there are two ISP, both allowing (I believe, but am not in a position to verify this anymore) 96 dialup lines per T1 to the Internet. Two other organizations locally have the potential for hundreds of users with full ethernet bandwidth routed to a T1, but I don't know what kind of typical numbers they actually experience.

That price may not be at all unreasonable. It depends on the distance between the end points, and on what type of facilities it must ride on. For example, if you are talking satellite facilities, as is the case here, bandwidth is *very* expensive. (Each 1.5Mbps satellite modem runs about $27,000 per copy, never mind what a satellite transponder cost if you either own the bird or lease it.)

Does it really matter? The basic fact is that it will slow down as the congestion increases. Hence if you have 1000 users tied to it, and they aren't doing anything... anyone that does something will have a lot of bandwidth. If 100 of them start doing the average things that users do, you are right down there at about where they would be with a dialup system.

The bad part, however, is that if 200 users start doing something similar, they *all* slow to a crawl.

The way to handle that is to not purchase a standard full time T1, but rather see what they will offer in the way of either Frame Relay or ATM (Cell Relay), with different rates for guaranteed bitrates, burst rates, and so on. This of course very much depends on your provider and the facilities they have available.

Hence, rather than asking here, I would suggest a telephone call, or better yet a personal visit to either the marketing or the sales people with which ever companies are available to you for provisioning of the T1. They can tell you what they have available, and they will almost certainly have experience with other customers doing similar things.

That beats the heck out of asking people who have no idea what makes a difference to your particular situation!

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