[OPLINTECH] Maxing out our T1

[Phil Shirley]

Our Internet speed is very slow for a good part of each day.  I have 
called the OPLIN help desk during these times and they've reported that 
we were using most of our T1 at the time (93% last time I called). 
OPLIN referred our problem to the network engineers at the state, and 
I've had a couple of people look at our traffic, and nobody can find 
anything bad going on, except that we just seem to have a lot of traffic 
(traffic dies down to almost nothing when the library's closed,  with 
all our computers turned on).  We're considering getting additional 
bandwidth from OPLIN or Time Warner.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has had this experience. 
We are a single-site library; we have 34 public Internet computers, and 
we allow games, streaming video, chat, and all kinds of things (except 
dirty pictures and stuff like that).  We do have one wifi access point 
for the public (segmented from the rest of our network) but its traffic 
is very low, and unplugging it didn't make a difference; I blocked the 
bandwidth-hog Runescape one day and that didn't make a noticeable 
difference.

Has anyone else faced an issue like this?  Is the modern web just too 
bandwidth-intensive for us to rely on a T1 for all our needs?  Thanks 
for any comments.

Phil
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Phil Shirley
Technology Services Coordinator
Cuyahoga Falls Library
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
330-928-2117, ext. 109
pshirley at CuyahogaFallsLibrary dot org