Can cable modems handle ALOT of concurrent connections?

[jdsanchez473]

I just landed a job working for the school board as the computer guy (one of 3 in the whole district lol).. There seems to be a whole lot of issue with internet related software and websites timing out. Browsing is very slow, but if you do a speed test it usually comes out above 1mb/s and the browsing speed does not reflect this at all. I got to thinking how the whole highschool is ran off of 2 cable modems (and a t1 that only feeds a couple rooms) and i'm thinking that they weren't designed to have that many concurrent connections passing threw. Or am i just over thinking here.

I've had issues like this in the past with a dinky home router. You could pass all the bandwidth threw it you wanted but once you got over 300 or so connections it was horribly slow.

They head guy is thinking of just upping the bandwidth but i'm not sure thats going to help.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

 

[jdsanchez473]

i was thinking again (wish i could stop, it drives me nuts) and i suppose the cable modem would prob. not be the issue. It would be whatever device is doing the NAT that would have issues with alot of connections. We have ZyWall 10's right after the cable modems that NAT it to the 192.168.xxx.xxx network. I can't find any info on them as to how many connections they can handle.

 

[dberg35]

How about DNS? Do you have an in house DNS server, this will also help.

 

[jdsanchez473]

yes.. im pretty sure i got them talked into going fibre.. They were going to just bump the speed up but i told them that the upload speed is still going to be crap, and we have VPN's running threw these cable lines and you can't get a whole lot done working with around half a megabit upload. So hopefully we can get like 10/10 mbit fibre, things would go so much better around here.