Question for iDirect dealer

The 2048 refers to 2048 kbit/s in the download direction to your site.

The 25:1 contention ratio means that up to 24 other people will be using the same capacity, so the price you will be paying per month will be very much lower price than that for someone who buys dedicated capacity with the intention of connecting perhaps 100 PCs and VoIP phone devices for a large business, community or internet cafe for example.

Using a 25th share of 2048k gives you a theoretical long term average of 81 kbit/s.  This is in fact very generous for a single PC use since average use is around 10 - 30 kbit/s per PC.   So it should be OK to connect a couple of light use PCs and a VoIP phone at your site.  

A possible problem is the way fair sharing is enforced (or not).  It is important that your iDirect hub operator applies the software configuration well and disciplines any greedy users.  iDirect equipment has a good reputation but it must be operated correctly. QoS software is also available to prioritise VoIP calls over internet downloads, for example.

There are other people here on this forum who I hope may be able to comment further about iDirect operation.  I don't have an iDirect hub (or a 1/5th share of a virtual hub!) so my comments are based on what I have heard from others.

Read more about iDirect here https://www.satsig.net/idirect.htm
wxw

Best regards, Eric.  

If the service provider is honest about the contention ratio AND doesn't oversubscribe the services you can basically divide 25 into the 2048 kbps of burstable to determine about what you should expect to see during peak hours.  The uplink would be determined in the same way.  I wouldn't expect to use such a service level for anything other then data applications as without a dedicated portion of bandwidth, nothing is guarenteed so real time applications such as VoIP wouldn't necessarily work well. 

If I can offer more information or assistance, please don't hesitate to contact me.