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How much bandwidth

Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:16 pm
by michaelcox
How much bandwidth do you all have in your meetinghouses?

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:27 pm
by russellhltn
Depends on what building you're talking about. Some buildings can only get certain types of service. I have one on a 4G wireless system and one on 3Mbit DSL system. (Although, I think that could be pushed to 5 if FM wanted to.) Neither of these are located in remote areas. The one with 4G is surrounded by a residential fiber system, but the phone company won't allow us to put the church building on it. And the wired phone connection is too far away for DSL. The conduits are too clogged to get cable.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 8:18 pm
by harddrive
I don't know what the standard is that the church is doing, but at my stake center we have just switched to coax and it is 16 megs down and 3 up and this is from a fiber connection that was 25 megs down and up.

The rest of my buildings have Comcast in them and I would assume that they are 16 down and 3 up, but one building had a different provider because Comcast isn't available there.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 8:49 pm
by Mikerowaved
I believe the FM groups try to get as much bandwidth for x amount of dollars. (No, I don't know what "x" is.) Because of this, they have to carefully look at each building and try to determine the best ISP and data rate that will meet their budget guidelines. Our 3 buildings used to be like this:

Stake Center - 45/7 through Comcast (Used to be DSL, but switched when a FHL was put in.)
Ward Building 1 - 7/1 through Centurylink DSL
Ward Building 2 - 1.5/300K through Centurylink DSL

The 2 ward buildings rarely got the above numbers, in fact, building 2 was lucky to get 300K-400K DL at any given time. Centurylink said that was the best they could offer. Comcast was in the neighborhood of our 2 ward buildings, but the FM group determined it was too expensive for Comcast to trench wires to the ward buildings. (It was many thousands of dollars for each site.)

We were fortunate to have UTOPIA in the area and a member of our stake presidency with a little pull; so a few years ago, all 3 buildings were upgraded to 100/100 fiber connections. What's funny is the monthly cost is probably not much more than what we were paying before.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 11:31 pm
by Hagothsen
I've been told, and can anecdotally confirm at least in part, that in the Las Vegas Valley every building will be migrating to Cox:

100/20 for Stake Centers
25/5 for regular buildings

I can confirm this is the case for 7 buildings in the south part of the valley in Henderson. Aside from the significant bump in speed, the move from Centurylink to Cox is a significant blessing. Distribution throughout the building via WiFi could be better. But, as an STS tasked with running broadcasts, I am SUPER THANKFUL. YouTube all the way!

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 2:14 am
by russellhltn
Hagothsen wrote:YouTube all the way!
I wouldn't bet on it. That's a separate issue.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 5:29 am
by Biggles
russellhltn wrote:
Hagothsen wrote:YouTube all the way!
I wouldn't bet on it. That's a separate issue.
In the past, usually only around General Conference, or special event times. :D

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:28 am
by Hagothsen
russellhltn wrote:
Hagothsen wrote:YouTube all the way!
I wouldn't bet on it. That's a separate issue.
The embedded video on the LDS website is a YouTube steam. I used it, instead of the satellite feed (10 hour uninterrupted stream!). This morning, I'm going directly to the Mormon Channel on YouTube. Looks much better with none of the typical Interference we get on our antiquated RF network.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:57 am
by russellhltn
Hagothsen wrote:The embedded video on the LDS website is a YouTube steam. I used it, instead of the satellite feed (10 hour uninterrupted stream!). This morning, I'm going directly to the Mormon Channel on YouTube. Looks much better with none of the typical Interference we get on our antiquated RF network.
That's nice, but I wouldn't count on YouTube except near General Conference. It's normally filtered out the rest of the time.

Most of the videos on the lds website should detect that you're in a chapel and direct you to a non-YouTube source normally.

Re: How much bandwidth

Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2017 9:45 pm
by rknelson
We have Cable internet in all 5 buildings with a couple of different carriers. Bandwidth varies from 20/3 to 50/10 to 250/20.

The 250/20 speed is what was required to get an install with the rather small provider in one case - they told us the sum of the 24 month contracted price plus the install fee needed to equal or exceed the "plant expansion" construction cost. I figured we might as well get big bandwidth since it cost no more. Of course with the 881W firewall we can only get about 85M download through it. We will be dropping back to a lower speed on contract renewal (and the supplier knows this). This building previously had slow DSL that was terrible for stability. The FM group was not able to reliably access the FAC facility zone, the VPN kept dropping out, and the Family History center access to sites like Ancestry.com was flaky. After untold hours on the phone with Tech support at the church and the DSL provider, firewall and modem equipment swaps over 6 years all of this was finally resolved when switched from our DSL supplier to a Cable Supplier. I'm not saying this is always true of DSL, but it sure was in this one case.

In stake centers where webcasting out for stake conference will be used, I feel having something around 5M upload is of value.