Recommendation for Further Education College.
An FE college is going to have many computers and simultaneous users, most likely over 100 unique users at any one time. This means that there will be a lot of information needed to be transferred to and from the internet. This makes me believe that the college needs a very high bandwidth internet connection, either T-1 or SDSL. I have chosen to recommend SDSL.
SDSL stands for symmetric digital subscriber line, meaning that the upstream speed is the same as the downstream speed. It has the ability to support data rates anywhere up to three megabytes per second in both the up and down direction; this makes it a very fast and powerful connection. SDSL works by sending digital pulses in the high-frequency area of telephone wires and can not operate simultaneously with voice connections over the same wires.
The reason I decided to advise the college to get a SDSL connection is primarily for price. The speeds are comparable to that of T-1 but the price is significantly cheaper as can be seen in my table produced earlier. I would advise that the college takes invests in the fastest SDSL connection available which will cost approximately four hundred pounds per month. Although this does seem to be a lot of money it is three hundred and fifty pound cheaper than T-1 and provides faster speeds in both directions.
You may wonder why I have chosen to recommend a symmetric internet connection. I believe the high upstream bandwidth is needed for when there are so many computers. This bandwidth will allow the college to be able to set up remote access for the students to access their work saved at college on there home computers, or for large websites to be published from the college. Even video-conferencing can be comfortably achieved within the bandwidth of this 2034K SDSL connection.