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.