Tech Forum

In talking with my FM coordinator, he told me that all ISP contracts, that the church currently holds, limit bandwidth to 20Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. I'm just wondering if anyone else has learned of this limitation and, if so, how they might have worked around it? In general these bandwidth caps are sufficient except for the stake center and our attempts to stream stake conference. I'm working to improve the broadcast on multiple facets; however, I feel that our upload bandwidth will be our bottleneck.

Just want to get the forums thoughts and perspective.

allencp wrote:In talking with my FM coordinator, he told me that all ISP contracts, that the church currently holds, limit bandwidth to 20Mbps down and 2 Mbps up.

We would love to have that bandwidth in our area. But we have broadcast stake conferences with 1 Mbps up to buildings with 750 kbps down.

I've never experienced imposed BW limitations, but I have been told about efforts to keep monthly rates in check. Which we all know, a given monthly rate may buy you a little or a lot BW depending on the area, and sometimes the very neighborhood, the building resides in. We happen to have buildings tied onto UTOPIA fiber with 100/100 Mb service and very likely pay LESS each month than others do with far less BW.

I don't know what service provider they use at the stake center (we have Comcast XFINITY and AT&T UVerse in our area) or what kind of plan they have, but the WiFi seems a little slow. In an ideal world, teachers would download whatever online content they want to use in their lessons, before they come to church, but they don't, so they have to deal with the slowness of the WiFi here.

It'd be nice if FM bought a bigger plan to deal with all the streaming and whatnot, but it is what it is.

moonman239 wrote:In an ideal world, teachers would download whatever online content they want to use in their lessons, before they come to church, but they don't, so they have to deal with the slowness of the WiFi here.

And here at one of our meetinghouses, if they do not download it before they come to church, they do not use in in their lesson that day.

There used to be a document that showed these speeds. When it was available the Church contracts were setup with 10D/1U - So if the contracts have been upgraded to 20/2 that's a good sign. There are plenty of stakes out there with MORE speed and plenty with LESS speed. FM Roulette / Availability are the keys to what you get.

The doc now exists here https://www.lds.org/help/support/isp-co ... o?lang=eng but doesn't have the speeds.

Windstream is missing from that list. We love to hate Windstream because they refuse to separate the telephone charges from the DSL charges, as requested by the FM. So our stake just pays the whole bill, and charges it to the telephone budget category. We know it isn't right to charge Internet bills to that category, but we have no choice.

drepouille wrote:We know it isn't right to charge Internet bills to that category, but we have no choice.

You are not alone. The Church actually saves several hundred dollars a month in this area over what would be the cost of split phone and Internet rates.

I think the FM may be slightly confused, the Policy is that the FM purchase the Best internet they can get for $50 per month or less. No limit on the Speed. What I think he means to refer to is the Firewall which if you have not updated it's configuration has a throughput limitation of 20Mbps. After the Update, the throughput is 68Mbps.

StevePoulsen wrote:I think the FM may be slightly confused, the Policy is that the FM purchase the Best internet they can get for $50 per month or less. No limit on the Speed.

I've heard of numbers like this as well, but I can't confirm where.

StevePoulsen wrote:What I think he means to refer to is the Firewall which if you have not updated it's configuration has a throughput limitation of 20Mbps. After the Update, the throughput is 68Mbps.

I don't want to fork the thread discussing firewall throughput, so let me just refer to you a post I made several months ago where I measured quite a bit higher throughput than what you stated above.