I've been tracking Internet bandwidth usage for several schools (RESNET-L reports), and I've seen it as low at 2.1 kbps/FTE (5+ years ago) to higher than 300 kbps/FTE. Most of the schools are between 30 to 60 kbps/FTE at this time. Very broadly speaking, rural and smaller schools are on the low end, while state schools with tens of thousands of students are on the higher end. Internet2 plays in the mix as well. In terms of growth rates, while our ISP serves only one college, even though they've been growing their bandwidth pipe at low-double digits per year, they are maxed out most days from mid-day to 1 am. If most ISPs see end-user traffic grow 50 to 80% per year, I can't see why schools would be much out of that range. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 5:52 PM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: Current trends in capacity planning and oversubscription On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Curtis, Bruce wrote:
If we take our current ISP bandwidth and increase it by 50% every year for 5 years it would be about twice the 100 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff recommendation.
Is 50% growth each year typical these days? In the dot-com boom days, people said 100% growth, other people have suggested 20% may be more reasonable now. A problem with government network capacity planning/growth forecasts is you will be stuck with whatever you choose, too high or too low, for many years because the budget cycle is so long. It would be great if there was some actual data available. But it seems more typical to benchmark/compare to do network capacity planning with other government agencies, so we end up with X-Mbps per Y,000 people. Yes, I know it depends. 1,000 people downloading data from LHC experiments will be different from an administrative school office. The difference is the people using LHC data usually have someone who can figure out network capacity planning, while the people in an administrative school office may not have anyone. So what is a reasonable network capacity for 1,000 students now and in 5 years.