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Finding the culprit to network delays

I have a T1 and our traffic has grown rapidly over the last two years. I believe that our T1 is no longer sufficient because we are having long load waits etc. At what point (75%, 80%, 85% of bandwidth) do you start having lag times from a T1?

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As with all engineering questions, the answer to this one is "it depends." While serialization and queuing delays are only two components of network delays, other factors will contribute to network latency. To answer your question, I would suggest a few steps to ascertain exactly what your utilization is. There are several tools available to monitor utilization, especially by application, host, and conversation. Cisco's NetFlow or SFlow supported by HP, Foundry, Extreme, and other networking products would provide a great deal of insight into your utilization and application distribution on the T1 circuit. By having this information you will increase your visibility into what is traversing the T1 circuit and understand usage patterns better.

This was first published in August 2006

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