1mb Kilostream from office to office

[jrwinterburn]

Hi all,

Just wanted a bit of advice. I need to join my two offices together for 6 months so that all staff at both buildings will be able to access the same network, and in fact be part of the same network. Eventually all staff will move to the new building.

I had first considered VPN, but although it's cheap, it's slower and unreliable. Therefore, I am considering going for a 1mb kilostream from BT as the offices are within 100 metres of each other. It's a bit costly, but only temporary.

Cost is not the issue though - what I wanted was advice from anyone who has the same/similar implementation. I will have between 20 and 50 users on the remote site connecting into the local site over the 1mb line. They will only be using Outlook to connect to Exchange, and reading/writing office files.

Is this realistic? Will 1mb suffice? Will the users be able to do the above without any problems, or will there be noticeable lag?

Any advice is appreciated.

Jon

 

[KiscoKid]

It's difficult to be able to absolutely say what size of pipe you need. The user base is only of a medium size but the emails and/or files they are sending/writing could be large in nature which could easily saturate the link. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen Exchange congest a WAN link after all.

Personally I didn't think there was a lot of difference in pricing between a 2mb and 1mb option from BT albeit I could be wrong on that assumption. Have you enquired regarding the price of a 2mb?

Alternatively you could implement QoS on that 1mb to prevent SMTP and file sharing from saturating it.

 

[jrwinterburn]

Thanks for your advice. I'll speak to BT about getting QoS on the line.