3 ms·

What type of Internet connection for a shared office in NYC

2 points by paddy_m 16y ago

We will be moving into a shared office that is being built out soon in New York City. The office provider is building out a new floor and they have asked us what type of internet connection setup we would prefer. I am not a networking guy so I don't know best practices. There will be about 80 people in 8-12 private offices on this floor. Mostly tech companies. I don't think people want to host sites from this location. What type/types of service would you recommend (t1/t3/oc3/ Metro cat5)? How would you handle redundancy? Is it reasonable for each office to get their own Time Warner connection in addition to the building provided connection? How much should this cost, monthly/capital expenditure? Thanks

brk 16y ago
Ordinarily you would set some sort of budget and back into an offering based on what is actually available. What carrier(s) currently have service in the building? Just guessing, you probably want something on the order of a T1 (1.5Mbps) to a business cable type account (2-10Mbps typical), which will be in the area of about $150ish (for cable) to $500+ (for a typical T1 loop+bandwidth). Unless your Internet access is SUPER critical to your business, redundancies don't make much sense. If you want to cover that contingency moderately cheaply, get a Verizon wireless broadband card ($60/mo) and a router that can do basic failover (Cradlepoint, Linksys, D-Link all have good options). The upside being that if anyone travels, they can take the 3G card with them (obvious risks apparent).
- paddy_m 16y ago
  Are you talking about a T1 per office? a T1 for 80 people seems way underspecced. I work at a company of 4-8 people. If the internet is down for an hour, think of the cost of those salaries that is wasted. Internet access is super critical to our business. I have worked at enough places where the internet was flaky, it is not an experience I want to repeat.
  - brk 16y ago
    No, I was saying a T1 is the absolute low-end of what you'd want to consider for the overall space. And yes, it's not a lot of bandwidth these days, but you didn't say what people would really be doing. A standard tech operation doesn't normally need a lot of Internet bandwidth. You generally can code and test locally and then push code up to a production server. But since every operation is vastly different and you didn't give a lot of detail on exactly what people would be doing over this pipe, I could only give general answers...
wmf 16y ago
It depends what providers are already wired into the building; those will be cheap and anything else will be crazy expensive. Business cable would be my first choice followed by Ethernet (Cogent if possible).

2 points by paddy_m 16y ago

brk 16y ago

Ordinarily you would set some sort of budget and back into an offering based on what is actually available. What carrier(s) currently have service in the building? Just guessing, you probably want something on the order of a T1 (1.5Mbps) to a business cable type account (2-10Mbps typical), which will be in the area of about $150ish (for cable) to $500+ (for a typical T1 loop+bandwidth). Unless your Internet access is SUPER critical to your business, redundancies don't make much sense. If you want to cover that contingency moderately cheaply, get a Verizon wireless broadband card ($60/mo) and a router that can do basic failover (Cradlepoint, Linksys, D-Link all have good options). The upside being that if anyone travels, they can take the 3G card with them (obvious risks apparent).

paddy_m 16y ago
Are you talking about a T1 per office? a T1 for 80 people seems way underspecced. I work at a company of 4-8 people. If the internet is down for an hour, think of the cost of those salaries that is wasted. Internet access is super critical to our business. I have worked at enough places where the internet was flaky, it is not an experience I want to repeat.
- brk 16y ago
  No, I was saying a T1 is the absolute low-end of what you'd want to consider for the overall space. And yes, it's not a lot of bandwidth these days, but you didn't say what people would really be doing. A standard tech operation doesn't normally need a lot of Internet bandwidth. You generally can code and test locally and then push code up to a production server. But since every operation is vastly different and you didn't give a lot of detail on exactly what people would be doing over this pipe, I could only give general answers...

wmf 16y ago

It depends what providers are already wired into the building; those will be cheap and anything else will be crazy expensive. Business cable would be my first choice followed by Ethernet (Cogent if possible).