Thanks for all your advices and comments. Now I understand a bit more on
this bandwidth issue. Since there are user using 10Mbps dynamic IP
serving 25-30 users, I am more confident to switch to 10Mbps dynamic IP
broadband to save some cost and hopefully to achieve some speed
improvement also.
Thanks again for your help!
H E Lim
[email protected] wrote:
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 2:57 PM, helim <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
My company's broadband is a 2Mbps fixed IP service with M1 Connect
(original contract with Qala) which costs $277 per month.
Currently SingNet has promotion for 10Mbps dynamic IP broadband
which cost only $198 per month. Since we had given-up the idea of
hosting web server in-house, there is no need to have Fixed IP
broadband anymore. I checked with SingNet sales but was advised
that the 10Mbps dynamic IP broadband can only serve up to 10
concurrent users and if exceeded, the Internet access may have
problems. We do have 18 office users but not all are accessing
Internet all the time and we also have a Computer Lab which has 12
PCs but hardly used by anyone nowadays. I used
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/ to test our Fixed IP Internet speed
which shows download speed range from 0.843Mbps to 1.016Mbps and
upload speed from 81Kbps to 226Kbps. This morning I went to
another company which is using Singnet 4Mbps dynamic IP broadband
and test the speed and was surprised to find the download speed
was 4.648Mbps and upload speed was 513Kbps! Can anyone comment or
share some experience on Fixed IP and dynamic
Traditionally, ISPs oversubscribe their available bandwidth. ie,
knowing that not everyone will attempt to fully utilise their
bandwidth at the same time, they can safely sell the same 1Mbps to
more than one person. In moderation, and averaged, this allows
everyone to enjoy higher maximum speeds at lower cost.
The extent to which they practice oversubscription is also known as
contention ratio. ie, how many subscribers are contending for the
same 1Mbps of bandwidth. What this could mean is that a highly
oversubscribed offering might have higher theoretical burst/peak
speeds but achieve lower sustained speeds when everyone else is
attempting to use the network, while a non-oversubscribed or fully
dedicated offering might have exactly the same burst and sustained
performance. So, this can explain the sales talk that a specific plan
can serve X concurrent users - if your users fit their profile of
typical users and you exceed the number of concurrent users, your
sustained bandwidth requirements /could/ exceed their planned
sustained bandwidth delivered. What's more, if everyone does so, then
the true amount of bandwidth achievable by each customer would not be
anywhere close to the advertised line speed, and each customer would
only obtain the planned sustained bandwidth which could be much much
lower, as you've observed.
In practice, none of the ISPs here are willing to tell you what
contention ratios they adopt, at least for consumer and lower-end
business traffic. There is an expectation of lower contention ratios
for business plans and for higher margin plans (eg. fixed-ip), but you
never really know. So, you have no idea how much bandwidth you can
realistically expect. This simplistic picture is complicated by lots
of other factors, and ISPs may also take QoS or packet shaping
measures to smooth bandwidth delivery. Users also typically have no
idea of their own traffic profile - how much bandwidth they really
need, how bursty the traffic is, etc.
Short answer: bandwidth and fixed-vs-dynamic IP allocation is
theoretically orthogonal. Your description of internet usage
requirements suggests that network speed isn't really crucial to your
business needs. If that is correct, just buy whatever you can afford
(eg, a 2Mbps dynamic IP plan would likely cost less and perform
similarly to your current service; 4Mbps, 10Mbps or higher might
improve video streaming, but so what?).
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