🚀 go-pugleaf

Na liscie dyskusyjnej ISP ostatnio przewijal sie ten temat. A oto tresc
jednego z ostatnich listow:

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Brian Elfert writes:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 29 May 1997, Edward Brotsman Dreger wrote:
> 
> > When first starting 8:1 is a good idea.  For instance, if you only have
one
> > line and two people want to dial in...  The "accepted" max is 10:1,
though
> > larger sites sometimes get away with 12:1 as they add the light users.
> 
> I think unless you start with a great many lines (IE 50 or more) that
> you'll need to stay closer to 5:1 or 6:1.

Even lower then that, really... when you startup you get a lot of
heavy-use, speculative users (IRC/juarez d00dz) that use a lot of time...
the email/light web users come on later.  Depends on how you market,
really.  

> We currently have 88 lines and are running about a 6.5:1 ratio at the
> moment, but could easily do 8:1 with the phone lines we have.
> 
> We can get away with 8:1 only because it's finally summer here, and
people
> are going outside instead of surfing.  During the winter when nobody
> ventures outside, we get busy signals at anything above 7:1.

We've managed to survive 8:1 to 10:1 (~175 dialups for a while due to
telco incompetence)  It varies a lot now that we went to PRI's, so we
are dropping 23-24 lines in at a time.  A good idle timeout helps
a lot.  Lots of people start a large FTP/web transfer then go have
dinner or something, so their end dosn't hang up when they are finished.
Worst problem we have is when they leave their mail client running...
So it keeps checking their mail every 10 minutes, when the idle threshold
is 20.   Some people have taken a hardass stance on mailcheckers,
pointcast and autorefresh webpages, but the bottom line is, that's what
people are using.  Lots of programs exist now for win95 that check
webpages, look for users online, keep up-to-date on the weather...
It's hard to tell what's what now.  And how do you say someone is idle
if they stayed logged into IRC via mIRC and walked away?  

And don't get me started on robo-dialers that reconnect when you idlekill
them. ;-) 

> > Anything about 15:1 or higher is *bad*.  Shiver at 30:1?  A local ISP
tries
> > to get away with *50*!  Then take into consideration that they throw
> > untested modems on the lines and "just kinda hope"...
> 
> How could you have ANY customers at a 50 to 1 modem to user ratio?

Live in an area with a very high barnum index?

> I once talked to a very small ISP who had 5 modems, and planned on adding
> more modems when they hit the 50 user mark.  Last I heard, they had a
> dozen customers.

<gag> from our startup, we were running 1:1 for a while.  (Of course,
that was during shakedown so that dosn't really count) when we actually
started it was 2:1 working down to 4:1, then moved down to 7:1 somewhere
around 70-80 lines.  (I'll have to find my old notes to find out exactaly)
after 100 lines it was fairly safe to hold at 8:1, though.

Heh, I'll bet said small ISP is running off an ISDN or 56k link to another
ISP in the area, right?  I've seen a few of them, mostly BBS-turned-ISP
deals.  I think perhaps 1 or 2 in the area are still around, most are just
internet-connected BBS's, and held at less then 20 lines.

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Jaroslaw Ozimek, e-mail: jozimek@gnet.pl
GETIN ISP, Wroclaw, Poland
tel/fax: +48-71-214253