Situation: Office of 140 sales reps and managers. They need to use the internet mainly for researching potential customers on-line.
A video service was introduced to our customers. Now, the sales reps would need a fast connection to be able to view the video service that was sold to customers. Also, the office VP stated he is interested in doing video conferencing. However, the main issue is staff internet to perform sales and research.
Occasionally, the reps would need to participate in on-line video training but most training does not contain videos and not all the reps would be viewing these videos simultaneously.
The IT Support team would occasionally download and apply updates to the machines after hours or during hours depending how critical the updates are.
We expect a few people to not adhere to company netiquette and YouTube or stream some music. Unfortunately, our company does not want to look into providing us the tools necessary to correctly police internet usage ... don't ask why but if you know any tools to do this, feel free to let me know.
We do not qualify for a DSL connection because of distance from the Central Office (over 11k feet). However, through various companies, we qualify for T1 and scalable / bonded T1 up to 6MB.
Comcast Business internet is going to do a site survey to see if they can provide a connection in our office of 8MB / 1MB.
We currently have a couple of T1s in place that actually pipe into our main office in California and ride off of their network. In essence, we are getting our internet from California and not locally...yet. The new line(s) would be for internet data only and not private network / internet data like our current T1s.
Advise on how you would proceed. I checked on HowStuffWorks.com and it stated:
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Depending on what they are doing, a T1 line can generally handle quite a few people. For general browsing, hundreds of users are easily able to share a T1 line comfortably. If they are all downloading MP3 files or video files simultaneously it would be a problem, but that still isn't extremely common.
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Would this be the case for the above scenario? Please advise. Also, what questions besides costs (install, monthly and hardware) should I ask when pricing? Thank you.