Matt Harris wrote on 7/31/2019 9:46 AM:
On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 9:21 AM Shaun Dombrosky
<sdombro...@blackfoot.com <mailto:sdombro...@blackfoot.com>> wrote:
Good Morning,
First time NANOG poster, apologies if I breach etiquette.
Does anyone have any first-hand data on how much data a
small-medium business (SMB) can expect to consume in a failover
scenario over a 4G/LTE connection? Retail, under 50 head count,
using PoS, maybe cloud accounting software, general internet
activity, 8 hour time period. Wonder if anyone is using a
Cradlepoint or SD-WAN solution that could pull a few quick numbers
from a dashboard for me. I haven’t had much luck in my searches.
Appreciate any info anyone can provide.
Thanks,
Hey Shaun,
I'd recommend pulling that data from the device normally facing their
internet connection. Does it support netflow or even just basic snmp
statistics that you could graph? Ostensibly the traffic level would be
the same regardless of whether using an LTE backup connection or the
primary internet connection unless you somehow prohibited certain
traffic when on LTE. Ultimately though, your best bet is going to be
to get real stats over the course of a couple of weeks and then you'll
understand better the traffic patterns based on time of day, day of
the week, etc, as well, as this is likely relevant.
Good luck!
100% agree with Matt. Something also to keep in mind is the SMB's peak
data rates. The primary (I assume ethernet) uplink may have a sub 10ms
latency and 100Mbps or greater data rate while the LTE connection is
probably several times slower in terms of bandwidth and latency. If
designing a failover connection, customer expectations may need to be
managed: internet access may be up, but will be noticeably degraded when
on LTE. A backup cable connection may be better for VoIP or other
latency/jitter sensitive applications and of course anything that relies
on a static IP (server, vpn, etc) will probably break if the primary
connection is down. Would be a good idea to test the failover connection
during a few different time periods to gauge employee experience.
--Blake
