Our company is growing, and growing fast. And everything we do is online -- e.g. our internal business applications are web-apps, hosted in a datacentre (we have multiple office locations), and we scan all our mail into a DMS hosted in the same datacentre.
Up until now, we've had an ADSL line (or two, at sites that have inter-site VOIP set up -- we have a dedicated ADSL line for this to avoid contention issues) per site, and this has been fine, but we're starting to run into speed issues -- not helped by the fact at our primary site we're so far from a telephone exchange, our ADSL syncs at ~2M down, ~0.5M up, on a good day, with a following wind.
Clearly, I need more bandwidth, and I've been asked to present proposals to management, with costs. No problem -- I need to go away and research pricing for EFM, leased lines, and all the usual jazz.
When we looked at phone lines, we were advised by a Telco to allow 1 line per 3 typical office users, as an industry norm, and this has largely been borne out -- I guess in our telephony usage, we're quite typical. But I've seen no such recommendation for Internet bandwidth, and searching for "bandwidth per user" and similar just finds discussion of quota or throughput management, not how much capacity to allow.
Is this information out there? What do those of you in larger organisations allow, when you're setting up sites and connections? Is there some typical number of Mbps per user that you'd be comfortable above and unhappy below?
I appreciate my piece of string might not be the same length as anyone else's, but I think as we scale up, we'll approach a "typical" figure that other organisations have also reached...