WebJunction

Welcome to WJ! Before I try to answer questions like this, I always like to get a little background as that helps inform the response and hopefully makes it more applicable to your situation.


What type of budget do you have for adding the additional bandwidth?

Are you located in a relatively urban area?

What type of service do you need (or alternatively, what type of service would suffice)?

The questions will impact the answers as they will help determine options available to the library.

If you need a dedicated connection that guarantees a certain amount of bandwidth is available to the library, you are generally going to pay more for that than for a "consumer" grade service, such as a connection provided through a cable provider which may offer you more bandwidth at a lower cost versus the T1.

If the library wants or needs to provide services such as distance learning or video conferencing, then it is probably best to go with a service that will guarantee the bandwidth. As far as your options for this type of service, once you get beyond a single T1, generally the options are pretty limited. Usually it is adding a second T1 at the same rate/price as the first or upgrading to a really humongous connection at a corresponding humongous price, i.e. a T3 connection offering 45Mbps and probably costing several thousand dollars a month.

The other options are that some ISPs will offer a "bonded" T1 solution that through some software trickery connects / bonds two separate T1s into a "virtual" single circuit to give you 3Mbps of combined bandwidth. The one ISP that I know of that does this is Speakeasy.net. There are probably others. (http://speakeasy.net/business/t1/bonded.php)

The bonded option or other advanced options are probably going to be more likely in urban areas where there is generally more competition. Many ISPs will also offer a guaranteed service level on the bandwidth for some of their DSL solutions, but again, this is generally going to be only in certain locations.

As far as finding a local ISP in your region or state, I would suggest talking to the state library and/or some library colleagues to find out who they use, especially a library of a similar size. You can also talk to the local school district as they often have tech staff that deal with these issues and may know from personal experience even if the school does to use them. I also have found that banks are a good place to ask as they often have to get high-speed connections in all of their locations and they have worked with a wide variety of ISPs and telcos (aka telephone companies) in the area.

As a last ditch suggestion, you might also want to take a look at bandwidth.com - they serve as a clearinghouse for getting quotes for bandwidth in various packages. You would get a call from a salesperson obviously, but they would be able to research your options for you and get you a quote.

Does that help at all?