If I were a typical Fortune 1000 company, how much would I pay for bandwidth? How much bandwidth would I use in a year?
I’m asking so as to figure out what the per GB cost is expected to be.
Not all companies use the same amount of bandwidth. I interface between Verizon and several of our blue chip clients. Some of them have a few dozen T1’s, others have hundreds of them. It all depends on how much of your business happens over high speed data lines. NOAA (a fairly small part of the federal government) has dozens of OC12’s and a few OC48’s because of all the high-resolution graphics and video they need to distribute around the country, but some of the biggest banking companies don’t need more than a couple of 56kbps DDS lines per branch because they spend the bulk of their time sending text files around. Some of our biggest end users are home businesses that operate porn servers, but you won’t see them on the fortune 500 list.
A single OC12 (622 Mbps) might cost you about $35,000/month. A T1 (1.544 Mbps) goes for anywhere from $450-$800/month depending on how much buying power you have with the provider.
What kind of business is it, and how much of the budiness would rely on high speed data connections?
Based on Patty’s numbers, assuming you’ve got those connections running at capacity constantly, I get a range of about $0.2-2/GB.
There isn’t enough information to answer the question. First, it depends on how many employees you have and what they do. Second, it depends on how critical the access is… if it slows down/cuts off randomly for 2 minutes a day, is that OK? Third, what is this bandwidth connecting? Just an uplink to an ISP, or are you connecting multiple branches together? Fourth… well there are a dozen other factors to consider.
Suffice it to say that bandwidth is not totally a commodity, and there are many different ways that it can be deployed for different purposes.
As a WAG… if you had a branch office of 1000 employees who are constantly uplinked to a remote database, and also exchange text and graphics on a regular basis, I think dual OC3’s would be a reasonable starting point. I repeat - that is a WAG I would make if I were your account rep and you refused to give me any more detail than that.
I was really just looking for an average. I realized that some manufacturing companies that don’t do much engineering work and use older workflow management systems, for example, would use less bandwidth than a Microsoft. I have a particular in mind, my employer, but I can’t name them and I’m afraid to provide specifics due to company policy.
If you don’t mind a little trial and error, you can call up your local telco company and get quotes on a DS1, OC3, and OC12. Tell them you don’t know how much you’ll need, so you will need an easy upgrade path. There are more sophisticated packages out there that can match your needs, such as low flat utilizations with capability to transmit large bursts of data. It’s kind of like saying, “how much does a rope cost?” Depends on what kind of rope, how many strands are in the rope, how much rope you want, how strong it is… talk to your account rep.
Another option I’ll toss out, just because I’ve heard of the company, is www.Yipes.com Assuming you’re in their service area, they run fiber to you and give you an Ethernet jack. Service starts at 1 megabit and is available up to 1 gigabit. The fun part is you can just log in and adjust your bandwidth as needed.