Questioning my Fraternities Network Setup

[Justinlong7292]

So I am in a fraternity and I have recently become the new IT Chair of the house, so I am in charge of all the pieces of technology of the house but most importantly the internet. I am studying computer engineering so I know some stuff about computers and a little bit about networking but more home networking and not small business stuff. Anyways, I figured I would ask some experts on networking to get some help on the situation. We recently paid around $7,500 to have our internet re-done because frankly it was a piece of crap before and only worked 50% of the time. Well for that $7,500 we now have an internet that at times can be quick but just as often dips down to as low as 3Mbps download and a whopping .3Mbps upload. For a house with a little over 60 guys in it, this isn't really the speed of internet we should have, especially since we just paid a company $7,500 to redo our internet. I am currently trying to get in contact with the president of our house-corporation because oversaw this whole project and the exchange of money with the company (Dymin Computer Systems is the company just in case anyone knows of them). I want to see if I can get a look at the contract because I do not understand what we paid for. In our networking closet right now we have 1 Cisco DPQ2160 modem, 1 Cisco 1811w Router, 1 Cisco Catalyst 2960 Series PoE-8 24 port switch, 2 Cisco Catalyst 2960 series 48 port switches, and then 96 slots worth of switch board plug-ins 78 of witch go to all the Ethernet ports around the house. I know that part of the $7,500 went to an electrical company who came and strung all the wires from the switch board to the rooms but I don’t know what that cost. As far as what we bought, I believe we only got the 3 new switches and already had the router and the modem. My first question is if the Router is really outdated because after doing some research I believe Cisco doesn’t even sell the 1811w anymore. My next question is regarding the setup of the routers and the switches. Currently our setup is as follows; the modem is connected to the FE0 WAN port on the router, then the FE1 WAN port goes from the router to a random 10/100 ethernet port on the 24 port PoE switch (not in one of the PoE ports), then from one of the switch’s 10/100/1000 uplink ethernet ports it is connected to another 10/100/1000 uplink ethernet port on the first 48 port switch, that switch is connected to the last 48 port switch also using one of the 10/100/1000 uplink ports on each switch, the final switch connects back to the 24 port PoE switch the same way so that all three switches are connected between each other using the uplink ports. From the 2, 48 port switches all of the ethernet cords for each room in the house go to the switch board then to the respective room. Attached to the 24 port PoE switch is the router, a network printer, an unused server (my next mission), and 5 wireless access points located around the house. The access points are the only things plugged into the PoE ports. Does that setup seem like the most ideal or should the switches each be plugged into LAN ports on the back of the router. It seems to me that connecting the 3 switches and then connecting the router to one of the switches and sending the signal to the other 2 switches does not seem like the optimal setup but that is from generalizing I’m no expert. The only other thing that I can think to cause the slow signal is if there is something with the settings of either the router or the switches that is not optimal and causing a cap on speed at some point or something. Our ISP is Mediacom and we currently have a business advance account which is advertised at 15Mbps download and 2Mbps upload which is not lighting fast but much faster than our current speed. Once we can get this internet to be consistent and a decent speed we were thinking of upgrading to the ultra 50 business account which is 50Mbps download and 5Mbps upload. If we were to do that would we have to upgrade any of the equipment to be able to support that stronger signal and to make sure that we would get the full use of it. Sorry for the long-winded question I just had a lot I needed to say.

[hobbe · Accepted solution]

Hi

First of all divide the text.

This is a rule that goes for any text you write. IF you do not put the text in easy to read chunks people will not read it.

its just to hard.

I started reading the text and I want to help you but you make it way harder than it has to be so I stopped somewhere during the first third of the text.

So.  I get that you are not happy with whatever speed you are not gettting.

to know what you should be able to expect you first need to know the speed of the link.

so what is the speed of the link ?

Then if you have no bandwith limiting or any qos or control of the links then you must understand that the person downloading stuff will take all available bandwith if he can.

If this is like any normal campus activity I have seen you will have quite heavy downloading and sharing of stuff.

I think you are quite right in taking a look at what the 1811 have the capability to perform.

but then that has to be placed in context with what link to the internet do you have ?

if it is a 2Mbit link then the 1811 should be able to handle it. if it is a 100 Mbit link then the 1811 is way undersized.

so lets start with what bandwith do you have today ?

what is the typical traffic pattern ?

HTH

[Justinlong7292]

I accidently hit correct answer there sorry (not that you arnet helping me, im just not done)

According to mediacom we are supposed to be getting 15 megabits/sec download and 2 megabits/se upload. What we have when it is at its peak at least fom my computer both hardwired and wireless is usually around 10 or 11 Mbps down and 1.6 or so Mbps upload. When traffic gets heavier and sometimes just randomly, it will drop to around 3 or 4 Mbps download and as far down as around .4 Mbps upload. I just ran a test on speakeasy.net and right now I am wirelessly conneted and it is 9.3 Mbps down and .72 Mbps up.

As much as I wished the traffic pattern was really easy to see a pattern in sometimes the fluxuations are completly random. More often than not the internet gets worse at night when all the guys in the house are on it and better throughout the day, but like today for instance, earlier I was getting upload speeds of around .3 and .4 Mbps.

Sorry for the disorganization of the text of my first response I have been especially scatterbrained lately because of course everyone blames me for the crappy internet.

[hobbe]

Ok first thanks for the rating..

well you state that you are supposed to getting 15down and 2 up.

Remove all other units and check directly from the inside of the router with one computer only.

what do you get ?

The result is basically what bandwith you have to play with.

you have 60 users that will give you a total for each of the users if all of them was going at the same time 250K down and 33K up

the last number is roughly the same as a modem ie not good right ?

if I am to speculate I would say that you are simply just filling the link.

there is not enough bandwith for the 60 persons.

if you do not have it today ask the isp to measure the link and let them tell you how much bandwith is used and at what times.

[Justinlong7292]

Yesterday i was on the phone with mediacom and did a direct connect to the modm and it was just shy of what were supposed to get. I think if I remeber right it was like 14.3 down and 1.8 up.

My next step is to propose to the house to get the upgrade in service to the 50 down and 5 up. Unfortunately the 5 up still isnt very fast at least if everyone is using it.

Another thing I was wondering is that some guys in the house have goten frustrated and have gotten there own wireless routers thinking that if they connect into the houses internet and then connect to their router wirelessley it will some how be stronger than if they just hardwired in. They think that they are creating their own internet to use but they are really just using the same internet as everyone else. Could this be part of the problem for the lower signal is that these wireless routers are sucking up all of the bandwidth?

[hobbe]

You are right, the 5 is not much, but then that is all in the eye of the beholder.

its kind of hard to say what is much or not it depends on where you are in the world.

in sweden we have started to use 4G wireless wich gives you up to 80 mbit for acceptable money for one user.

in lux I know that they pay through the nose for highspeed internet connections so the price can be quite high there.

Have you checked out other ISP´s ? other solutions ?

The problem that can come out of changing to the higher speeds like 50/5 will then most likely be the router.

it might not be able to keep up with the higher speeds and it might become the bottleneck.

The fact that they use their own wireless routers / AP does not impact the performance of your network.

It does not matter if they use wireless or connect directly to the cable.

As a general point students want loads of bandwith so my best bet would be that more bandwith is the answer here..

If you have the possibility you might have some luck with a proxy.

That will most likely help you some atleast for places that are visited frequently..

and that will free up some bandwith since the proxy will cache localy.

but it will not change the fact that you need more bandwith.

good luck

HTH