The purpose of this section is to provide general recommendations for bandwidth ranges for each of the supported solutions. These recommendations serve as a general guide for understanding bandwidth targets for regional site solutions.

There are two distinct bandwidth requirements to factor into your SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment:

• Bandwidth consumed by user-generated actions. User-generated actions include browsing, searching, and uploading or downloading a document.
• Bandwidth consumed by the crawler at the central site while crawling content at the regional site. This bandwidth requirement applies only to Solution 2 and Solution 3 if crawling the regional content is implemented. The recommendations provided for this bandwidth requirement will help you decide if crawling regional content is feasible.

User Bandwidth Recommendations

The recommended bandwidth ranges for each of the supported solutions are based on a typical user profile. These bandwidth recommendations do not include crawling content.

The typical user profile represents a sampling of user-generated actions that a typical user will generate in a given day. The user profile is based on data published in the Capacity Planning guide and Solution Accelerator for Intranets. For more information about these resources, see Additional Recommended Content.

Characteristics of the typical user profile are detailed in the following table.

The bandwidth range recommendations for accommodating regional users are based on an average size of 275 kb for all operations. The actual size of user operations will vary based on the size of Web pages and documents in your portal site.

While the typical user profile provides a baseline of user behavior that can be used to understand how users access a portal site solution and the relative size of the resulting operations, the data provided in this section assumes that the percentage of traffic from the regional site to the central site will change depending on how much of the solution is hosted at the regional site. The recommendations are based on the following assumptions:

• Solution 1   All of the regional user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions travel over the WAN.
• Solution 2   Most of the regional user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions are local to the regional Windows SharePoint Services server farm. Less than 20 percent of the user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions travel over the WAN. These actions are related to using the enterprise-wide portal site hosted at the central site.
• Solution 3   Very little of the regional user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions travel over the WAN. Because a regional portal site is hosted locally, less than 3 percent of the user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions travel over the WAN.

Bandwidth Recommendations for Crawling Content

The crawl process typically consumes all available network bandwidth up to 28 Mbps. Beyond 28 Mbps, user-generated actions can be accommodated simultaneously while the crawler is crawling content.

Due to the nature of bandwidth utilization during the crawl process, the bandwidth recommendations for content crawling are based on two different configurations:

• Shared Connection   The crawler is configured to crawl content across the same network connection as user-generated SharePoint Products and Technologies actions. Crawling is configured to start after peak hours and is intended to complete overnight (before peak hours of the next day). The target crawl window is 10 hours.
• Dedicated Connection for Crawling   The crawler is configured to crawl content across a dedicated network connection. Because user actions are not impacted, crawling is configured to run as long as necessary (around the clock). The target crawl window is 7 days. For more information about configuring a dedicated network connection, see the "Configuring a Dedicated WAN Link for Content Crawling section in Improving Performance of Content Crawling.

Additionally, there are several options for configuring the crawl process to optimize performance over the WAN. For more information, see Optimizing Indexes for Crawling Regional Farm Content over the WAN.