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Internet Connection Costs

We are currently evaluating our costs for Internet connectivity. I'm just curious about other Agency's cost-per-user. It would also be helpful to know location and number of employees. We're thinking $25 per Employee, per month. This is some-what of a guess based on past use, speed and available services in our area. We currently have 27 employees, host our own email and have minimal remote access requirements. We are located in Grand Rapids, MI. Any assistance, thoughts or information (as above) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Dave Braford IT Manager Hanon McKendry Advertising

I am running a fractional T1(512k) here for 475 with 55 employees so that is about 8.50 per employee. There was about 600 in initial costs converting our DSL router to a T router, UUNet setup fees and the like....we to have little remote use, other than hitting our in house email server while remote. We have more than enough bandwidth, I have not seen the speed drop below 400k. It almost sounds like you are on an ISDN with those costs? If so the above may be an option, or DSL. But I would worry about DSL from anyone other than your phone company, Covad and Rythms will go away very soon I am afraid. And with email in house you may have issues with you local phone company being able to supply 24/7.

Jim Kennedy MIS Brokaw Inc.

We are about the same size, 30 people with our own email server and building an intranet and possible running My Clients & Profits for our freelancers. We have a dedicated T1which costs us about $960 a month (including telco costs). Setup costs are negotiable and if you don't have a T1 router make sure you get one thrown into the contract (Cisco 1600 or 1700 series). Having a T1 means that you are notified within minutes if your access is ever interrupted. And usually the problem is resolved before you even notice that your are down. DSL and ISDN are not monitored so you have to call to report the outage and it may take hours or even days before your access is back up. If your business is critical like ours and cannot be without email or web access then find a way to afford a T1 line.

Eric Lepire IT Manager Nerve, Inc.
http://www.nerveco.com

We are currently running an ADSL line with 1.2mbps down and 1.0mbps up for about 35 employees. Only cost us about 350/month. However DSL problems take hours or even days to have serivce returned. We have been down on 3 different occacions for 48 hours or more. Usually it is a Qwest issue or the ISP and Qwest point fingers at each other. So now we are getting a Full T1 and I expect all of the above issues to go away. Yes, it cost about 945/month and 1500 for install (can sometimes be wavied). IF internet access (email, web, ftp) is critical to your business, then haveing either a Fractional T1 or a Full T1 is the way to go.

Just my $.02, Mack Avery II Network Administrator BBFM,Inc

We have DSL access, and it is true that sometimes you will need to report outages and it may take a few hours to get service restored. It has even taken up to a day before. But for the difference in cost between 768K SDSL (under $250/month) and a T-1 (where $960 per month including telco fees is a *good* deal), it's worth it for us to have a $21.95/month dialup account as a failover. If our DSL goes down, we still have Internet access and most of the time we still have email also, since our mail server is on the premises and we can temporarily use the dialup ISP's gateway. Of course, if our DSL provider's primary and secondary DNS servers both go down, that can cause real problems - but that just doesn't happen very often. Definitely not often enough to justify another $700 per month. Our business is as critical as that of many others in this industry, but we have found DSL to be reliable enough to rule out the T-1 for now. Maybe when we grow from 10 to 50 people we'll change our tune. :-)

Scot Robnett K.W. Powell & Associates