How much bandwidth does your office use a day on avg?

So, tell us, what are your office stats like!

Now that i am NA for our new office, which before was 5 people, and now it is up to 23 people at one time, i have been very closely monitoring our internet access.

With our new provider, we pay by the /mb for bandwidth so of course i am watching anything that could cause excessive usage, like blocking downloading of media files and such, of course people find ways around this, to which i then find in reports and block it.

As it stands, right now, with say an average of say 14 people working between 7am-4pm and 4 people working 3pm-11pm and 2 people working 11pm-7am, we are using about 9G of bandwidth a day.

Now i really am not sure if that seems like a lot or not as i don't have much to compare it to versus the past 5 people as we just had 2 4mb/1mb cable lines and i didn't monitor anything much.

Some stats from the firewall system:

• Avg data rate (1-day)............76 KB/s
• Peak data rate (1-day)..........21 MB/s
• Avg data rate (7-day)............9 GB/day
• Data Transfered (7-day)........61 GB

We have 1500 people, I have no idea, but it has to be massive.

160 students, 20ish staff members -- around 5-10gb down, 1-2gb up -- a day -- depending what classes are happening that day. A lot of bandwidth intensive sites are blocked though.

wow, thas not too much, i woudl of thought more.

We do have facebook open, but i blocked .mp3 so that saves alot, but i do find people keep finding various site to watch full movies/tv shows that done use file extensions since it is embedded in code.

be curious what 1500 people would use, maybe go talk to your network admin

Hmmm... i'm not 100% sure on this, but if they're all getting on facebook and looking through pictures, that could eat up a good bit of bandwidth too. I know i have a habit of going to an album, and then clicking through all 200pictures in the album. 30ish K time 200 gets you 5.85Meg for one album...

That's all i could think of besides movies. Couldn't you just block flash code altogether?

ya, image is a big part, all the zygna games, iw ant to cut back, but we also want people to still be able to have some access, so i am more trying to cut back on most of the extra's, but things like full streaming movies are gonna go!

Mr.Guvernment said:

wow, thas not too much, i woudl of thought more.

We do have facebook open, but i blocked .mp3 so that saves alot, but i do find people keep finding various site to watch full movies/tv shows that done use file extensions since it is embedded in code.

be curious what 1500 people would use, maybe go talk to your network admin

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I would have as well, we put in the bandwidth graphing after we pulled in a fiber connection this summer. We did the fiber for the mail/web hosting. We came from a DSL connection with 768k up and 5mb down. It could fully handle the amount of bandwidth we pushed through (download wise, upload stuggled like crazy)...But the issue was when there were 30-50 students on the computers at a time, the connection would just choke and people would be downloading whatever/browsing insanely slow.

If we unblocked facebook/myspace/game sites I am sure the bandwidth usage would go up quite a bit. Also they are not allowed to use youtube unless it is for a class project so the system is pretty locked down from the bandwidth intensive sites.

There was one day earlier in the year where one of the projects for a class (12 students in one of the labs) and they were to research certain videos on youtube, they pushed 8gb's of traffic within a 50minute time slot.

Along with this, there are no windows updates going out (from the outside) to the computers, we have a server cache the updates then distribute them to the computers throughout the school.

Well yesterday we used a total of 4.28 gig. 3.73Gig in and 563.37MB out.

36 users..

I use a program called CommTraffic Pro. And Can break it down by user on who uses the most...

couldn't even imagine.......~400,000 employees.....(I work at IBM)

My work uses around 20gb a day and checking a friends work that does backup services they use about 2tb a day.

PLOBBY said:

I would have as well, we put in the bandwidth graphing after we pulled in a fiber connection this summer. We did the fiber for the mail/web hosting. We came from a DSL connection with 768k up and 5mb down. It could fully handle the amount of bandwidth we pushed through (download wise, upload stuggled like crazy)...But the issue was when there were 30-50 students on the computers at a time, the connection would just choke and people would be downloading whatever/browsing insanely slow.

If we unblocked facebook/myspace/game sites I am sure the bandwidth usage would go up quite a bit. Also they are not allowed to use youtube unless it is for a class project so the system is pretty locked down from the bandwidth intensive sites.

There was one day earlier in the year where one of the projects for a class (12 students in one of the labs) and they were to research certain videos on youtube, they pushed 8gb's of traffic within a 50minute time slot.

Along with this, there are no windows updates going out (from the outside) to the computers, we have a server cache the updates then distribute them to the computers throughout the school.

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Do you by any chance work for NWR? lol

They just got new internet put in, and it's a lot better now... no youtube/facebook/games though. I can pull MP3s off my server in my Computer class at max upload now where as it used to be ~50Kb/s. 6 (i think) computer labs, each one with 35PCs running all day, and each comp pulls roughly 10mb down per class (4 classes a day). Then there are roughly 200 computers for teachers, student computers in class rooms, and then 35 laptops for the science labs/French classes. Last network check i did, i came up with 368 computers... so... assuming 10meg per computer per class per day would be 14 gig a day.

Not too bad for a school handling 1600 students

CompuTamer said:

Do you by any chance work for NWR? lol

They just got new internet put in, and it's a lot better now... no youtube/facebook/games though. I can pull MP3s off my server in my Computer class at max upload now where as it used to be ~50Kb/s. 6 (i think) computer labs, each one with 35PCs running all day, and each comp pulls roughly 10mb down per class (4 classes a day). Then there are roughly 200 computers for teachers, student computers in class rooms, and then 35 laptops for the science labs/French classes. Last network check i did, i came up with 368 computers... so... assuming 10meg per computer per class per day would be 14 gig a day.

Not too bad for a school handling 1600 students

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Haha nope but blocking that sort of thing is pretty standard across the board. The public school I worked with over the summer blocks streaming music (radio), youtube, games, and just about everything else noneducational...

The only kind of media my school doesn't block is MP3 and WMA. Any kind of uncompressed audio, or really large audio file, is blocked. The teacher accounts can access YouTube, but the student accounts can't... it's pretty well thought out.


Last year was horrible though... the fastes speed i EVER got was 50K down... and the upload didn't even register. We were allowed just about anything except facebook though.... it was unusable due to all the other labs though... took like 10 seconds to stream one second of video.

Traffic to Level3


Traffic to Sprint


http://netstats.neu.edu/

good info, looking back to when i first got in the office i had 160G one day downloaded..LOL tried to remeber what the heck i grabbed then recalled i grabbed a ton of archives files from our toronto offices.


i am using ntop to see real time stats in our untangle box, does pretty well and the untangle 7 reports stink for detail unlike 6.2 but 7.1 is to fix that, so for now i check ntop every day see what is going on, been also tweaking the firewall, some workers do a lot of research of various competitors and their software (online gaming, gambling) so i had larger port ranges open for them, i was finally able to tweak that down as 2 guys had Azerus going getting songs all day long, so i just closed down all ports from range 2000+, now to tweak the 1-2000 range, almost seems like some clients change ports day in and day out, rather annoying!

Also another IT guy is downloading tons of things, which i already have one a shared drive for us, LInux ISO's, drives, all that, i keep telling him like DUDE!!! i already have that stuff downloaded and shared, remember!!!

next is the internal Windows Update server, that will help cut back as well, then i am tossing in a squid server to do some cache work.

thas some serious bandwidth fishy!

I guess i look at it like, what do people need for work, email, and various reporting sites, almost all are internal, and then i see someone peak out at like 12mb download and think WTF did they hit they needed that much speed!, how can someone have a 1.2mb avg over a few hours, which then makes you dig more for details and see all these media websites people hit, you wonder how they get any work done at all!

We seem to be having an average 20mbit/s incoming and 2-3mbit/s outgoing during office hours. Peaks are about 200-300mbit/s.

Office with about 200 employees and no restrictions on what web services people can access.

Can't get any sensible statistics on transferred data, we have some data moving between datacenters which throws everything out of proportion.

I don't care too much about what individual people do (traffic wise) as long as they don't break the law or policies. How much work they get done is between them and their superior, not my problem.

I just checked a vps my work uses to transfer data around and its been running at a constant 20mb for the past 45 hours and I have no clue why .... last week it was maybe 1mb in peak times lol.

i cant imagine what the school i go to uses.

But at home i have uploaded ~ 150GB in the last 3 days, downloaded about 50GB. yes thats the right way around and units.

nd4spdbh2 said:

i cant imagine what the school i go to uses.

But at home i have uploaded ~ 150GB in the last 3 days, downloaded about 50GB. yes thats the right way around and units.

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What did you upload lol? I have high speed downloads but my upload speeds take me a day to upload a 1gb file.

deed said:

What did you upload lol? I have high speed downloads but my upload speeds take me a day to upload a 1gb file.

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26 / 20mbit net helps alot for that!