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Hi there!

Does anyone know how much bandwidth is enough for 2000 concurrent users? 

They will be all wireless connections and for simple navigation (social media, photo/video upload).

Thanks!

What are you trying to accomplish?  Are you trying to calculate how many access points you will need to support that many users or is there some other requirement? It's not a straightforward answer unless you just want to know a static number. For example; if you have 2,000 users and each one requires 1 mbps then you need 2000 mbps. 

Hi Eric!

Actually I'm trying to calculate how much bandwidht I would have to require from my ISP for an event with 2000 concurrent users.

I know that the "dumb" calculation it would be 1mb for user 2000mb total.

But I was hoping to see if someone had some experience with something like that, because if we suppose that we limit for 1mb for user, they won't be consuming that 1mb all the time, so we could use for instance 1GB link instead of a 2GB link, does that make sense?

Thank you for your attention on this matter!

If you really want to make "good" calculations, find a book on Tele-traffic Engineering and/or Queueing Theory.

Older math used for phone systems, but it works just fine for just about any communications field.  Wi-Fi calculations are complicated by retry rates though, so watch out for that.

I know that wasn't the answer you were looking for, but I just had to add my two cents on the topic.

That's not a book on my bedside reading table :), maybe it should be.  I think this falls into the realm of oversubscribing. The cable companies use this to mete out bandwidth without causing too much complaining.  I've looked into this too, because I'd like to know what the "proper" rate should be. I guess I'll have to get the book - or maybe Howard you could just tell us...

Thanks!

There is no single correct answer, although there are "cook book" calculators that provide numbers.

There are too many variables, one of the most important being "traffic mix", e.g. are they streaming videos, shopping on-line, or retrieving email.

Just about any big hardware manufacturer, and their internal sales department, will give you an answer - but of course they want to SELL you something, the more the merrier.

Companies like Cisco make EXCELLENT hardware, but caught much flak in the past for greatly  overselling gear to unsuspecting and naive school districts.