adsl v leased line

[roballen]

Hi,

Does anyone have any views on the possibility of converting a business setup from using a shared 64Kbs leased line to using ADSL?

The organisation in question has 16 workstations but only 10 or so are in use at any time. The current shared 64kbs diginet leased line isn't enough bandwidth and there are often problems downloading emails. Would one ADSL line be able to cope, would 2?,3?,4? Could the leased line router be used as a router for the ADSL line?

Has anyone done such a conversion - if so it would be great to hear about the problems and outcomes.

Many thanks

Rob Allen

 

[kaspaas]

If 64k almost handles the situation, ADSL should be fine.

My office is about the same number of workstations.

BUT then you have to remember that your are at the mercy of the whims of Telkom regarding bandwidth shaping.

You can forget about reliably downloading mail from an international server in the afternoons.

You can forget about many other basic Internet functionality eg setting your PC clock to a US time server during office hours. And Telkom does apparently not have such a server for public use.

But as long as you stick to the web, sending e-mail via the appropriate Telkom SMTP server and downloading mail from a local server, you should not have much problems.

I do a lot of work via SSH/SCP on local servers and the only problem I have is the unsceduled disconnection by Telkom.

Depending on the amount of bandwidth you use, you might need a second account for the bandwidth (Like Telkom's Prolog @R219)



South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

 

[mithrandi]

Also, if your monthly bandwidth usage regularly exceeds 3GB, then you'll need to be prepared to deal with effective loss of international connectivity after the point in the month where you hit 3GB.

mithrandi

 

[martin]

Yip, it's amazing how fast just 4 people on an ADSL connection hit the cap, with mostly just regular surfing for research purposes and the bi-weekly anti-virus download.