Does anyone know what the bandwidth requirements would be if I wanted to host Exchange? I have 68 email usersand 30-40 would be in the same LAN. The remaining would be connecting toExchange via a POP3 at numorous smaller locations. What kind of bandwidth should I be concidering for incoming and outgoing?I have the green light to lease a 10M up anddown, but notsureif I need that much or if I need more (i.e. 20M). Please advise.... Thanks

That's quite an open ended question. So here's an open ended answer to go with it but I hope it helps... I don't know what the bandwidth usage differences are between IMAP\POP3 and Outlook using Cached Exchange mode but I have seen Exchange deployments happily working with around 100 people remotely using cached exchange mode with similar or smaller internet bandwidth available. But you need to take into account a few things. How much data these people will be pushing across the line (pop3 client downloads as well as the mail serversending\receiving fromtheinternet)? Will you be getting a business type connection and what contention you have to deal with? Will you have a third party receiving e-mail on your behalf and filtering out spam and viruses because that will eat a lot of your bandwidth? What other applications and services will be using the link? Thanks, Mark

Hey Mark, Your are correct that it is an open ended question. I understand what you mean by how much data we are sending out and coming in. For the most part, each user is sending out standard sized Excel and Word docs and the only other application we have that uses the bandwidth is VOIP. Currently, I have 60 IP phones connecting between 6 VPN tunnels. We will be getting at least a 4.5M up and down T1 to start, but I am considering 10M if that is enough to have my remote users connect via a POP3. The Exchange portion is more for internal use, but I wanted to get rid of hosting our email service withan outside ISP. Currently, all locations connectvia POP3 to retrieve email. I understand what you mean with using the Cached mode, butI was thinking of having in-house users connected to Exchange and the remote ones via POP3. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advanced. Michael

Hi, What your plan on the deployment is feasible. It seems that there is no issue at current. Please go to implement based on your thought. Just a piece of opinion, The RPC over HTTP can also be used to connect Exchange for the remote user. Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998950.aspx Thanks Allen

Hi, If you are planning to connect your remote site / internet users using RPC over HTTP (which isrecommended)as suggested by Allen, you can use the document available at following link to calculate the B/W requirements. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc164325(EXCHG.65).aspx The document is a detailed one. Steps would be to define your user profile & then calculate the amount of traffic each user action will generate. Regards, Vineet "Please mark this post helpful, if it really did"