Office 365 Expert - I am not. I have a customer that...

Wed Jan 7 23:17:26 UTC 2015

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:37 PM, Bob Evans <bob at fiberinternetcenter.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Does anyone have any experience with Office 365 hosted that can tell me
> the practical bandwidth allocation (NOT in KB per month, but in

Most likely in the real world where packets don't line up neatly... O365
is most probably not the largest bandwidth user,  when there is
Pandora and Youtube.
It depends on factors that may be specific to the organization which
are truly unpredictable
for each individual user,  but you could gather data for your specific
population of users.

I believe I would just ignore O365,  since the bandwidth usage is not
much, and pick
a standard rule of thumb for the amount of bandwidth your typical
Office user actually needs
to get work done,  that includes more than sufficient 'slack' for O365.

My suggested rule of thumb if you can't actually measure the traffic
in advance for your
population:  count the number of workstation devices that will be your
network,   figure
at least 0.5 Megabit of WAN   for  each typical business user
workstation or laptop.

Assuming equal numbers of active users and workstations all operating
8 hours a day (
if there are many more devices than users,   or many more users than
devices, then  adjust in proportion).

    *Each internal workgroup server or Office manager's workstation
counts as 300% of a workstation.
      (In other words:  better  figure 1.5 Megabits for each of those,
 instead of 0.5.)

     *Each  Wireless tablet or phone connected by WiFi = 33% of a workstation.
       so add  0.17  Megabits  for each  staff person that may connect
a smartphone.

     *Designer, Engineer  workstations are 500%   (So figure 2.5 Mbit
for each of those).

Add an extra safety margin of either  2 Megabits,  or  30%,
whichever is greater.

So for  100 standard workstations, 100 Tablets,  2 Internal servers, 1
Office manager desktop, and 2 Designers.
I would say    get a   100 Megabit WAN.

> megabits/sec) for 100 users (during normal work hours) needs to be
> available ?
>
> Thank You in advance,
> Bob Evans
> CTO Fiber Internet Center

--
-JH