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We are looking to implement a backhaul that can support up to 40,000 users. Does anyone out there have experience associated to what this would cost to operate and the bandwidth that would be required to support this? This would be for a large campus.

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I'd imagine this can only be answered by your local telcos. Bandwidth costs different amounts in different places. Bandwidth would likely depend on your students too. A university heavy on computer science might be different than an agricultural school... – ceejayoz Nov 28 '11 at 15:10
I downvoted this because the question is too open ended. Surely you have some systems in place already that will answer your question better than we can anyway. You must have existing trending graphs showing usage for a segment of your users that you can extrapolate from, and you'll have current telco bills to tell you how much you pay per megabit. – JakePaulus Nov 28 '11 at 15:19
40,000 users doing what? 40,000 users using SSH for shell access to remote machines requires substantially less bandwidth than 40,000 users watching full-motion streaming video. Also there is no way for us to give you a cost basis - SF users are spread all over the world, and what costs $1000 a month in the US may cost $10000 a month in Zanzibar... – voretaq7♦ Nov 28 '11 at 16:39

closed as too localized by ceejayoz, Scott Pack, mailq, voretaq7♦, Iain♦ Nov 28 '11 at 16:53

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

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When I worked for a small ISP, we had approximately 2000 users, with average cap 4Mbps and their aggregated traffic was 250-300 Mbps in approximately 95% of time, urban area.

That's just an brief example, it may not help you, but you can try to use some logarithmic scaling if you prefer.

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