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Bandwidth Demand at American Universities
Robert Rwebangira writes: "There is an article in The New York Times (free reg required), discussing college students 'insatiable demand for bandwidth.' Of particular interest is the continuing prominence of file-sharing (inspite of the demise of Napster) and the amount of bandwidth consumed in even 'legitimate' activities. It seems students demand for bandwidth just keeps growing."
can't get enough of that...
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
What are the three things that will always be scarce? Money, time, and bandwidth. You can't have enough of all three.
void women (int money, time_t time);
for this need for bandwidth, just substitute the word "porn" each time you see the word "bandwidth" and you have your answer. heh.
-- Dan
When the demand for bandwidth has usurped the demand for beer. What's wrong with children today?
Some universitys are now capping people at around adsl speeds to try and limit the charges
In the UK Universities tend to use very restrictive firewalls to prevent the use of filesharing apps like FastTrack clients from slowing the net down for everyone, but sometimes this gets a little extreme.
For instance, at Durham they prevent you using not only file-sharing apps (a good thing actually imho) but also IM programs such as Jabber/MSN/ICQ and even telnet! Yep, you can telnet into the uni network, but not out. I want to do a Computer Science degree there, but I can't understand why they prevent the use of chat programs when their bandwidth use is neglible. Can anyone shed some light on this?
thanks -mike
Not only will they expect to have more bandwidth, but they will expect to get it for free.
Jeez. Kids have it so easy these days.
Without specific proof, I'd be very willing to say that it's not just students. As the internet grows, and we get faster computers, and more visually intense websites, its only obvious that bandwidth demands for EVERYONE is going to grow. The size of applications and games has also risen, and even downloading legal demos and share/freeware games is bandwidth intensive, this is not even to mention 'warez' and the fact that nobody seems to be happy with porn 'pics' anymore, they want vids. So, as download sizes grow, its only obvious that bandwidth demands will also grow.
Don't Tread on Me
I attend a UNC system school, and we have NCREN powering the internet access. A little background info, everybody has one or two ds3 or oc3 lines. NCREN has an oc48, an oc12, and a handfull of oc3 lines uplinking them to the world. The problem is, that NCREN has given oc3/ds3 lines to companies like microsoft, and they load down the entire system. The traffic graphs for my university never really exceed 40mbit/sec on one line, and 12mbit/sec on the second line. We even have a third line, and its dark most of he time.
But the NCREN oc48, oc12, and all the oc3 line outbound are allways loaded at 99%. In ncren before you hit the core routers, pings are below 30 ms, once packets leave, they have gone as high as 2000 ms. NCREN refuses to admit there is a problem, or resolve the issues. One problem also seems that one of sprints core routers that peers with NCREN is faulty or over loaded.
I must admit, when I lived in the dorms, it was nice to sometimes be able to play the major ra3 servers at 35-55ms.
One thing that would help decrease the bandwidth usage is a good proxy. This won't give users more bandwidth, but it should remove some extra bandwidth usage when people download the same things. The real problem probably comes from file-sharing programs and warez servers. A good firewall should do the trick, but a firewall that disables ICQ and such is not a good firewall.
The universities really ought to set lower expectations on bandwidth by setting up QoS on their routers and allowing greater bandwidth from the classrooms and for web browsing in the libraries while dropping other unnecessary protocols such as those used by file sharing clients to almost non-existent levels. It's ridiculous that the universities allow file sharing to go on like they have. If the file is important to school work, the student can e-mail it.
... is that people get used to high bandwidth as customers. Even though they may technically be customers who are supposed to be buying an 'education,' the fact is that (typical, 4-year, residential) colleges / universities seem to provide professors and classrooms only to supplement their provision of high-speed, on-site-service, always-on, relatively unrestricted network access. This is one reason I regret not living in the dorms at Univ. of Texas, which it turns out grew some good-at-the-time ethernet ports while I was in school, and I bet are still good.
... I'd pay $300/mo for the always-on mediumband available in rural Montana etc), I want there to be an increasing supply of college grads used to insane, insanely cheap bandwidth to help drive the market :)
As someone who wants to be a customer for better internet access of all sorts (true all-continent roaming access for N. America at least would good
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I am a student at a university in South-Africa. From campus you are only allowed internet if you have an account for which you pay, and once you have this you are only allowed HTTP. I had to use tunneling to get on IRC for instance. Another thing is our whole university probably has about the same amount of bandwith in total as about 10 computers in the US use. This is not the universities fault, but rather out countries weak communications infrastructure and the fact that we have one telco with no compitition.
All you students and other people in the US should stop complaining, you have _loads_ of bandwith.
If you build it, they will come. Now that they built it, they wish they hadn't come.
reading this, sitting here at my university, down in the basement of the math building with about 20 servers humming away.
The thing is: wouldn't more bandwitdh raise tuition even more? (It's more than enough now.) If there's a real demand for it, it'll be satisfied. But I'm not so sure there is, considering the cost.
(But I guess many students wouldn't care, just because they don't have to pay tuition, whether due to parents' benevolence or student aid.) *shrug*
blimey,
it's like being at school again
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
In the school system I work for, we use a product called Packetshaper. It allows us to block content, limit bandwidth etc... We just have all the bandwidth hogging apps down to less than bearable. Frees up the existing bandwidth nicely.
"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats."
At my big ten University bandwidth use by the residence halls has been enough of a problem to cause our keycard access system to become DOS'd. You need keycards to buy food, enter buildings etc...
As of Monday 1.5 GB a week upload and 1.5 GB a week download restrictions go into place. You get two warnings if you exceed these limits and then your residence hall connection is yanked for a semester.
The university I work at has a huge pipe (1Gb I think) shared with two other local universities. Generally we use the least amount of the bandwidth, but at one point our usage had hit like 500Mb/s Needless to say teh other schools were freaking - they were losing packets due to teh pipe being so full. Well, our dorms are on their own network. Sure enough, thats where most of the bandwidth was going. Blocking Kazza/Morpheus and co is tough since it'll switch and seek out other ports. So the only solution was to limit the total bandwidth for the dorms to 25Mb/s Sure enough, once that block went in place our usage overall dropped to like 90Mb/s. 300-400Mb/s of bandwidth just for the dorms????
The students were upset since their pipe was now slam full and they had trouble getting out, but the response basically was - stop running servers and stuff for music that suck up bandwidth and you'll be able to get on the Net to do the stuff you need to do. Its not perfect, but for now it works and keeps us from totally saturating our pipe.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
The problem is unlimited, flat rate access. The solution is a market based approach where people are charged according to how much bandwidth they use, and not draconian anti-market restrictions on utilization.
Want to use more bandwidth? Sure, as long as you're willing to pay for it.
Light up all the dark fiber in the US, problem solved... for a while. Seriously though imagine all the cool technology that would come out of having tons and tons of bandwidth.
You know... The one about data actually being a gas?
:o)
Expanding to fill the availible space.
Or, like in this case, bandwith.
Cheers!
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I work in the Academic Computing Services department of one of the UC Schools...
The majority of our problems come from about 10% of the population on campus who are online 24/7 downloading their pr0n, thus giving most of the other students probably polled in this study a reason to start asking for more bandwidth. I should also add that these are the same 10% who are hogging internal bandwidth playing counterstrike, etc.
I think that the term "Insatiable Demand" is definitely a misnomer. Although the "Prominence of file sharing" does apply to quite a few people in our dorms, 90% of the people are utilizing the network for, at most 10-20 megs a day. In fact, we have a 2Mbit cap on the routers coming out of the dorms, and most users find that they can surf the web and get their 3 or 4 files a day with no problems, and are pleased that, at 4AM, they can get an insanely high throughput. The reason that the students complain about the network being slow is because of the caps (which most don't know about) at peak times, because, again, the 10% that actually do have an unquenchable thirst for data would take full advantage of the situation.
I should add also that we block Morpheus, thereby removing those oh-so-lovely TCP standards hacks it implements, so YMMV
Notice that it looks like their using NT4. Take a look at the monitor in the upper left hand corner. Looks like an NT4 logon screen to me.
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
Here's an idea on how to cut down on internet bandwidth and still keep students happy... use file sharing programs just over the local network not the internet. That's got to cost less.
At an unnamed university in California for whom I work, we have available at any given time ~ 40 Mb/s, with around 800 students living on campus. Normally our network situation isn't bad, but this last fall semester it got completely out of hand.
Of the 40 Mb/s, on average one-half of it would be in use directly by students in the dorms. At times, individual ports would be using 7-8 Mb/s, for as long as ten hours at a time. Eventually, it was decided that the impact on the university's bandwidth was affecting the educational functions of the campus network and all users were reminded by mail of the campus AUP for the network.
Students, being students, ignored it largely. The offenders who chose to ignore it and flaunt the fact they were ignoring it (anything above 2 Mb/s for over a few hours) were warned by mail individually, and after that, had their ports shut off and the MAC address of their computers banned from the DHCP pool, so no matter where they went (i.e., plugging it into their roommate's port), they were locked out. To receive service again, they needed to contact the student judicial affairs, which involved only signing an agreement not to be naughty again, with the threat of being kicked out of the dorms.
Long story short, a few people got their ports shut off and had to go through all the rigamarole. Most of they had no idea what they did was wrong, and didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal, but the reason they received the notices in the first place.
It boggles my mind to think that these kids got into a university and don't understand that downloading the new N'sync album before it's on store shelves is illegal. Theft is theft, no matter who you're screwing over, but luckily, most will figure it out pretty quickly when the university tells them they were disconnected because Sony contacted the university about their particular computer, and yes, both the university and Sony would be more than happy to have them kicked off campus rather than deal legally with a pirate.
the only reason i'm going to college is for the fast fast internet connections...maybe i should just quit college, get DSL or Cable and save a few 10s of thousands of dollars a year.....nah, what a silly idea.
;^)
They blocked pretty much all incoming IP traffic. There is no way to run a program like KaZaA and send files to people. It is still possible to download via the P2P programs however.
This has saved a *ton* of the university's bandwidth. Besides blocking all incoming traffic, they have also capped the upload bandwidth and capped the download bandwidth (but at 1.5 megabits so its not that bad)
Presumably, no school likes to block (ports or content) but perhaps it can be done sensibly, in coordination with other measures. Do the schools want to promote fast mp3 downloads, or fast course registration?
My school, Babson College, is a small private business school with a several year old consistently need-meeting fractured t3 system serving the entire campus. Typically, we do not have bandwidth problems despite consistent file-sharing on the part of 1800 students and 130+ professors alike.
However, due to the school's preventative administrative thinking, there has been a ban of network access to files shared with kazaa and morpheus, and our "network usage code," which strikes me as more strict than many Nazi party laws I can remember learning about, technically forbids usage of our network for anything besides academic purposes.
I see it as a blatant waste of time for a school to even try. I share and download my files not only on Direct Connect and EDonkey, but also on the school's very own Community Drive! My school has essentially ignored several letters sent to it by the RIAA and the MPAA regarding abuse of its network by students such as myself, and I see very little way that any given school could eliminate free network access to any significant number of students and still recruit incoming freshman successfully.
Jack S. Phelps
jphelps@Babson.edu
Here are just a few router stat graphics from my university. As you can see, Kazaa/Morpheus is 85% of the outbound traffic!! Inbound isn't quite as bad, only 63% or so.
If you don't attend Chapel Hill, you may as well not go at all. It's the only UNC that counts.
GO HEELS!!!!!!!!!!!
OK, first off, I'm very serious. And I'm ignoring such things as Morpheus, Gnutella, etc. Those should be blocked.
But honestly, is it so unreasonable for bandwidth demand to go up? The medium is getting richer. Websites are taking advantage of media like Flash, movies, and sound more and more. More information abounds. People want stuff in more than just plain marked-up text. Maybe the increase is disproportional, but there are people (like my parents) that still believe that a 28.8kbps modem is sufficient. Not true.
Yes, as new services (including gnutella and napster) come about, there is a natural demand for more access. Deal with it.
More, quicker, better. It's the way things will go.
"To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root
I attend a small state school of about 7000 undergrads(well, maybe not super small) and across the past year we have experienced precisely this problem. We have ethernet jacks in all the dorm rooms and everybody was running all the usual file sharing apps and it got to the point that you could not surf the web. The browser would time out because it went to long between packets! So the beginning of this year, A QoS package(I beleive we're running packeteer) was set up on our firewall to hunt down and block the packets for these programs as well as streamline some other network traffic and things have really cleared up. It's not blazing fast but surfing happens at a reliable 20k/second which is pretty snappy for browsing. Linux ISO's still take a while though ;-)
Things to think about in the current suggested solutions:
1. Limiting bandwidth to dorms just hurts students who don't run these programs! Yes there are some of us out here. The majority of students even in a small school can not be organized to stop running this type of software. They just bitch about the slow connection and keep right on downloading mp3's. At least that's what happened when our college tried it.
2. Blocking ports isn't effective. One of the earlier posts mentioned about how Morpheous and others seek out new ports. This makes normal port blocking on a router or firewall useless and may arbitrarily block other software that is not a problem but happens to use the same port. You have to have software smart enough to look at packet type/content to be effective.
3. QoS software works if you get the right package. I work for the computer center at my college and I know we went through a number of packages before we settled on one. But it really makes a difference and it's suprising how many people don't even know this sort of software exists.
porn isn't important, it's music and warez
maybe rediculously high software prices mean students couldn't buy it, even if they wanted to
Problem is, no one at school wants to hear about the problem; they just accept the collateral damage.
Does anyone know why/if this must be the case? i don't really understand why the software (perhaps Packetshaper as mentioned above) ruins the ping times - shouldn't it just drop enough packets so a TCP connection stays at a slow transfer rate?
Also, shooters generally use UDP to send the state information. I imagine file transfer programs use TCP. Not knowing much about the software, would it be possible to shape TCP connections and not UDP? (this would require reading the header)
At my university that's nothing. Everyone has complained about the lag all semester long.
Last summer they bought a lot of fancy routers and changed everything around. Unfortunately they didn't read the instructions and the end result was complete crap.
Fortunately I live off campus but it's still a pain if I have to use the lab computers.
my sugestion is really that they calculate on average how many users would be online at any one time...
give em about 100k/sec each, pipe through routers to not let em infringe on other ppl's bandwidth, and you're set.. i know 100/sec is huge for "ledgimate use", but in this day and age, waiting for a wabpage is hella anoying even if only for 2 seconds.. standards are increasing, i can still remember when 9600 baud (thats what it was called back then, i remember, i was wearing an onion on my belt) was huge and only rich ppl had it, the rest of us losers were on 300 to 2400 bps...
maybe even set up a program to calculate their bandwidth and if they go over lets say 4 gb of trafic in a month, it cuts them down to a pipe of 10k/sec for the rest of the month (some kind of fair-use clause)
well thats just what i would do if i were running things.. of course they wont take logical, well thought out steps to fairly solve the problem, they'll just bitch and whine, and then maybe block ports or something and punish the whole group...
Of course by then I'll be demanding real-time, life-size holographic video of a "phone-call" to a friend in Asia @ 3 million DPI.
Then finally, matter transport. I wonder how many bytes it'd take to decribe each atom and all its subatomic particles. How many atoms to a human body? Let's do it Star Trek style, and do it in about 5 seconds.
Fast forward a million years, and let's say we haven't blown each other up yet. We'd probably be at the equivalent of God by then.
"Hey Jeff, fancy creating a solar system today?"
"Why not Bob?"
"Well fancy that. OK." *click* "What do you think of that for a Sun?"
"Pretty impressive. Hey let's transport Dave's planet from quadrant four over here. That bastard is always gloating. It'll take him a few seconds to find it."
"OK." *click* "Hey it sort of looks nice doesn't it?"
the bandwith is all used up. About one out of 10 hotline server out there is run from a US university. Those servers pull about 10 users each, downloading at 50k/s and upping at 50k/s each. And that's just hotline!
The bandwith problem will never be resolved. The bandwith allocated is going to be saturated so maybe they should introduce a paying system instead of whinning. If you top 5 gig download a week, pay for your banwith. Hitting students where it hurts more - the wallet - maybe the only viable solution.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
We were having that problem big-time this year, with the opening of a new 300-bed dorm (at a school where the entire on-campus population isn't over 3000). The first few weeks of classes, our internet connection was all but unusable. What they did to fix it, and it worked really quite well, was to purchase a packet-sorting device. From what I understand, it checks out the packet type, and if it's "legitimate" (http) it gets high priority, but if it's "illigitimate" (file sharing, etc) it goes intoa bandwidth-limited priority. Once they installed this thing, browsing the internet was back up to full speed. Sadly, I can't even connect now through Morpheus or Bearshare or the like, but I'll pay that price, since I'm positive that a lot of the freshmen were sharing out gigs of mp3 and video, and this is probably the only way to stop them. Besides, I've got high-speed at work. I just feed my habit there. ;^)
Do not read this sig.
As a full time student at the Swansea Institute for Higher Education (SIHE), I am boarding at one of the campuses. Unfortunately, SIHE has not given access to the network within dorm rooms, but they have allowed for NTL (UK Telecoms/Cable) to be put in. Every room is rigged for Cable, so anyone can have phone, cable TV or cable internet, provided they pay NTL for it, and SIHE has no qualms over what is dealt with over the connections. Sure, it may cost me £35 per month for the basic package of cable internet/tv/phone, but since I don't go out anyway, it doesn't really matter about the cost.
I am the breaker of Chairs!
A month or so ago the company I work for did a network survey for a smallish private high school. They don't really have a coherent policy about what to allow, what not to, so the students run wild on-line.
Anyway, we put a packet sniffer on the network - turns out an average of 94% of their 10 Mbps pipe was being consumed by Kazaa traffic (port 1214 for those who are curious). That's a lot.
So, this being a high school (OK, perhaps a privileged one), I can see the bandwidth demand for universities only going up when students such as these finish high school and enter univerisity. Large amounts of bandwidth being readily available is gradually becoming the norm, at least here in North America.
Glenn
I thought you could forge your MAC address under
Linux?? If not I'd be finding a cheap source of
network cards and round-robining them.
Gee I guess you need to be some sort of super-human genius journalist working for the NY Times to find this out.
I guess that seminar he visited on "stating things everyone knows" and "In your face: Getting hit by a clue-by-four" are really paying off.
In 200 years this guy could get a position on the USS Enterprise as counsellor. (Perhaps after some breast-enlargement surgery).
FYI, I'm not trying to troll. It's just that "journalists" reporting inane stuff like this piss me off.
Same thing happened to me at a completely different school, and it's really annoying.
i say this half in jest, and half seriously. if you have 5% of the campus accounting for 50% of the bandwidth usage, and as one of the other posters has noted, with the bulk of this being porn, maybe the university has a obligation to identify these people and offer them addiction counciling. think about it. serious comments appreciated.
I did a security assessment at a large university late last year, and found something astonishing. The number one expenditure of time for the computer security staff was dealing with cases of "copyright infringement" from the representatives of record companies. And I mean, it was something like 80% of the manpower. What was also infuriating was that a lot of these cases involved MP3s that had been posted by the band to their own website (that week that I was onsite, most of the warnings given to the university had to do with a song by Incubus, if I remember correctly, that had been downloaded from the official Incubus website.)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
At my school (Lehigh University), we address bandwidth problems this way...
Each student (each MAC address, really) is allowed to transfer one gigabyte within a 12-hour period. If you go over the limit, you get put in a "penalty box" (basically sub-58k speeds) for a while until your transfer total for the past 12 hours is under a gig. Uploads and downloads are counted separately, and transfers that don't go off-campus don't count at all. One of the university's servers holds a list of what addresses are in the penalty box, and what their transfer totals are.
This is quite effective - it gives each student a reasonable amount of bandwidth, and it only punishes those who actually use too much of it. And our 45mbit internet connection is rarely maxed out.
Just wondered. Thank you.
Ok, I didnt go here with exact figures, but as far as I know I seriously doubt that we even have anything more that 15Mbps. (If you take that most ppl have T1's, going at 1.54Mbps.)
:)
Anyways, it comes down to the fact that we have very little bandwith and that you should be happy with what you have.
So you "frown" huh?
Would you also "frown" if you were the one who had to pay for all this bandwidth usage?
I bet you would.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
These two products do wonders for bandwidth hogs, QOS Works by Sitara also has a built in HTTP cache. Packeteer's Packetshaper does the same thing (without the cache). Initially you simpy plug them into your LAN and they monitor the types of traffic for a while then provide you with charts and graphs. You choose what types of traffic to give how much bandwidth. If some new hog show up you find out pretty quickly and can limit it easily. Really slick products. Can be costly though.
The point isn't to stop it, but to treat it like a second class citizen. So if there is no shortage of bandwidth you can do all the filesharing you want, if the "legit" traffic uses 75% of the available bandwidth then there is 25% left for filesharing. The only blocking would happen if the "ligit" traffic manages to use all the bandwidth.
From a technology point this is a pretty easy thing to do, the first paper I read about it was in, um, '94 I think, and was oddly enough about a UK to USA pipe that was jointly owned by a research university and a business, they carved it up to 1/3rd of the traffic to the business, 1/3rd for faculty, and 1/3rd for other uni uses (students mostly). Any of the 1/3rd were unused the other two could split the slack.
This scheme is much better then outright blocking for a lot of reasons. First is fairness, it is fair to let the filesharing go on when there is spare bandwidth. Second is practical use, if you block a port people will quickly use another port, if a port is "just slow" it will take way longer for anyone to realize they should try to work around it. In fact as long as the reasoning is explained many people won't even try to work around it.
Depends on the limit. In this case "whatever is left over" seems pretty reasonable. It would work out to far more "network time" then most astronomers get "telescope time", right?
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2002/01/01-11 -02tdc/01-11-02dnews-02.asp
Finkployd
At Purdue University the poor schmoes who used to enjoy
extreme bandwidth in the dorms or on special university ADSL
lines have gotten killed by traffic shaping that the university put in place to contain Napster.
Instead of banning Napster users, everyone has a download quoata of about 200MB/24 hour period (it's a sliding window) and after that, the network will become slower than a normal 56K dialup.
I partially blame the university for not having enough bandwidth to the backbone (37,000 students running off of 2 lousy DS3's is an insult). However, the inherent structure of the Internet is not well equipped to equitably share bandwidth. TCP/IP is an inherently unfair protocol in that it vastly favors low latency locality in transfers, and that means that on Purdue's campus some people would be able to hog major bandwidth to download movies, while others would have to wait 15 minutes just to grab email.
My best guess for a solution is to turn on IPv6 and MPLS so that legitimate traffic can go through unimpeded, and the people trying to grab 800MB movies off the net can wait a week for them to arrive. (That and an OC192 backbone link).
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What next, UCLA is rally the University of Central Louisiana? MIT is the Michigan Institute of Technology? CMU is Collge of Medicine of Utah? :-)
As a current uni student (somewhere in london) with an insatiable bandwidth hunger, i think this article really applies to me and my peers. Mostly, it is bang on correct. However, from my experience, i can add quite a bit more. Ok, here comes a BIG ramble folks:
;-) I can reguralarly notch up a few gigs in a day. Granted, much of this is work related. I download the genome data regurlarly. I change distro once in a while. And, er, I like file sharing. Alot. Movies, MP3s, games, whatever.
You often hear asking people about what use their is to rolling out broadband internet access? What will people want from all this bandwidth? When you have it, you use it.
I am one of these so-called "top-talkers". The local network administrator has (jokingly) told me he has an eye on me. Our relationship is cool though - he is an arse and doesnt know the half of it
I like many others, have no regard for university bandwidth usage. I think I have pretty good reasons why. The amount of bandwidth used by academia used for legitimate purposes is swamped by non-academic purposes: For example, the human genome project centres in the UK and USA have recently started transferring the raw trace files between themselves from the human genome project. There quite simply isnt enough bandwidth for transferring the vast quantities of these very large files. They now have to ship them accross the atlantic on DAT tapes. The amount of scientific data transferred around in academia is quite simply vast, and dwarfs any number of mp3's and divx's.
Anyway, why shouldnt students use the internet for non-work related use? In the UK, the universities subsidise our beer, ffs. They provide sport, entertainment, club-nights, host bands, subsidise societes etc.
Furthermore, much file sharing occurs between students. As long as you are sharing a file between two universities, the cost is non-existent for the universities in question. At least in the UK, Universities pay a flat rate for access to the Geant network between european universities. It is only once data leaves the academic network, it starts costing more.
Therefore, this could easily be used to allow recreational use of the network, whilst keeping costs low. A while ago, one of the cambridge colleges allowed a napster server purely for use within the cam.ac.uk network. We tried to set up something similar whilst in Oxford, but the authoroteies wouldnt have it. Essentially, have a purely internal napster server, which was the only one students were allowed to connect with. The Idea being that the server would be involved in promoting new, local talent and have tie-ins with forthcoming gigs etc. This is the true ideal of napster and also wouldnt really cost the college. I guess they were scared of legal action though, and quite rightfully.
Also, they mention the illegal use of college networks by hackers and virus writers. This has alot to do with the fact universities have some amazing bandwidth, but IMHO, some very lax administrators and security policies. Sure, some students are involved in this stuff, but you should really be thinking script kiddy playground.
I think Internet Providers should be keeping a close eye on universities to see what happens when people get free, fast, unlimited bandwidth - and the problems that may occur.
Universities buy books for libraries that hasn't been checked out for years or just once five years ago. It's for a small % of people who would use the book.
The demand for bandwidth is going up and universities should get more bandwidth rather than try and fit everything to something they got 5 years ago.
My University (~5000 on campus students) just upgraded it's internet connection from 20 to 50 mbits/sec. This is quite a large increase. However, my perception of speeds isn't much different then last semester. They still stink. Compared to my cable modem at home from a local indpendent coop, it's like waiding around the 'Net on a 56K.
Why is that? Because my school implement a 5 mbit/sec upload cap between all the dorm subnets. When that limit is saturated almost all the time, I can barely load pages because all my packets get dropped on the outbound connection. That with almost 20 mbits/sec of download pipe unused!!!
However, to see my school implement anymore of a logical implementation of bandwith control would probably cause me even more pain. Why? One word: DivX. This new medium is spreading through schools faster than anyone can imagine. I think mp3's are slowly going the way of the dodo when people find full screen DVD rips that look just as good as the original!!! I personally know people with hundreds of full length movies downloaded off the school's connection. (You do the math.) I guess until Layer7 switching is implement, all those bastards clogging up the pipe will continue to do so. What happened to the good old days when you could find what you wanted on IRC?
On a side note, my schools admins commented to me once that 60% of the capacity Internet2 is being used for file sharing between universities. Chew on that for a while.
I go to a fairly major university that's had its share of bandwidth problems. Our network services division has done everything from deny that a bandwidth problem exists to limit outgoing bandwidth to prevent file sharing from taking place and simply saying "well, if you want faster speeds, don't run file-sharing." Lately it has been acceptable, except for outgoing bandwidth, which can cause ping-spiking in games.
Now, this is a technical-oriented school, particularly in the CS and engineering fields, so computer-literate users are quite common. What most people don't know is the effects of leaving programs such as Morpheus and KaZaA running 24/7. We had a "computer JR" (judicial referral) discussion session, the gist being "don't get caught," but the more telling thing was the users of such services.
They had no idea how to restrict outbound transfers or even how to change shared folders. I've heard them complain they are awoken at 4am from their HD churning away and they wonder why. Each of their eyes was wide-open in amazement when they found out that they could get a "computer JR!" They had absolutely no notion of what they were doing, the effects of it, and why it caused problems. They shouldn't be allowed to run those types of apps, period. I blame it on the generation of people coming in who found that Napster was "cool."
And yes, I have felt the effects of these selfish idiots hogging bandwidth when using the network for legitimate, educational means.
Are there any ways to get network services to listen to us?
At a big upstate NY school, we have had massive problems with that. It was mainly Morpheus and Kazaa, and I used to work for the computing consultants and I would get a LOT of calls in about how little bandwith kids in the dorms were getting. I personally in my dorm couldn't even check slashdot because it was so bad, and our school has numerous OC3's too! It was a painful experience, but the school just send out mass emails about how to turn off file sharing in Morpheus and it made it a WHOLE lot better. I myself have been a bandwidth hog (using over 2 gig's a day, but rarely) but no, these kids are even worse with their MP3's. And it's even harder to tell my roommates to not do that stuff because it hurts everyone else. And yes, We have major companies down our throats... All the time.
I've said this before, but its a good point. Even though its been pointed out to me that some of the file sharing software supports this, people don't primiarly share locally. They abuse the upstream connection for all of their sharing, when chances are good on a large university campus, there will be numerous others sharing similiar things, and the local bandwidth is cheap and plentiful.
The clients used for this purpose need to prioritize on local networks. Even if there is a limit on the number and speed of the connections, give immediate unrestricted access to anyone thats on the local net. This will encourage people to look first from within and only search the rest of the internet if it can't be found locally. If other large universities did the same thing, then the incoming requests would also be significantly minimized.
Remember, if the upstream connection is used or a local one is used, the local bandwidth is spent anyways. Might as well quit wasting one of them.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
as i see it, the problem lies in students' view of computers as music storage devices rather than tools to do classwork. napster/audiogalaxy/kazaa/whatever is now seen as the primary use for a computer in a dorm room, and the students with those computers, being the unwashed masses of the internet, will often leave the default settings on, sharing all the files they download. large numbers of people doing that will slow down any internet connection.
but that's not it. because this is how the students see their computers to be used, they expect that the campus resources for internet access should be adjusted for their obviously non-academic activity. this sense of entitlement is at the root of the problem. without all the people who only know their pc as a souped-up jukebox, there would be plenty of bandwidth for legitimate use.
that may sound pretty out there -- i'm just speaking as someone who's seen the cycle of network saturation leading to a blocked ip or rate limited port too many times.
Seriously -- trying to prevent bandwidth abuse by students by explaining that downloading MP3s is criminal is the wrong approach to controlling bandwidth.
Make 'em pay instead -- give everybody a useful (and network friendly) amount of monthly or quarterly amount of traffic. Students who exceed this amount lose access to anything but select campus resources (library, burar, registration, etc) UNLESS they cruise over to the bursar's office and buy more bandwidth, which should be easy and simple for them to do and at market rates.
This money should be directed exclusively to the university's network operation center for the purpose of maximizing internet throughput -- gear, upstream capacity, people, caches, etc.
My guess is that of the people who are chronic bandwidth abusers, 75% won't pay more and will go do something else. 25% will pay more and will monetarily help offset the problems they cause.
The other solution would be to say "We just can't afford student inet access anymore" and give the kids access to university resources (library, etc) only and those that want broader internet access would have to buy it from an outside vendor at market rates. Again, this lets the marketplace solve the problem.
I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech and you *never* *ever* had bandwidth consumption problems unless you were really insane (at one point one guy was using 60% of the schools bandwidth to run a pirate site and he got cought). Georgia Tech just had a lot of bandwidth because they knew tehy needed it.
Anyway, I expect that almost all Tech schools have reasonable notions about bandwidth consumption. There is a very good reason for this: Tech schools know that every single person is going to use a lot of bandwidth, so they provide the necissary amounts inb the first place. Your average university which just installed dorm networking is tring to bullshit themselves into believing that only a handful of people actually use the network.
Anyway, I do not think dorm bandwidth should play a huge role in your college decissions. Still, bandwidth is a better reason then football to pick a school, so I say most people should at least find out how much bandwidth the school offers prior to attending. I would say a more importent point is that bandwidth and computer policy *may* be indicative of other administrative issues and you sould pay attention to the over all administrative picture.
I can tell you Georgia Tech is an absolutly great school in terms of computer policy (and administration). Georgia Tech students complain a lot, but they are pretty much full of shit. Actually, the *only* real problem I can remember at Georgica Tech was the coop office's power trip issues, but who would ever want to coop anyway.. it's a waist of time.
I can also tell you that Rutgers has one of the worst administrations I could imagine (without going to some psycho religious school or some place with specific serious rights problems). The rutgers dorm networking is absolute crap and they have insanely small quotas which essentually enshure that you will not use the network for anything interesting. I've never been stopped for it, but the quotas are technically too small to DL a RedHat CD.
btw> I do like Rutgers as a grad school since I like the department and my advisor, but I hate dealing with the rutgers administration and I can see undergrads having very serious problems (since they deal more directly with the administration).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I don't like Acceptable Usage Policies. I see them and think "these guys haven't built their network properly". I want their network to let me do whatever the hell i want, and restrict me automatically through technical means, not allow me to overload everything, THEN tell me I've been bad.
I'd like to see bandwidth restriction based on current overall usage too, rather than times of the day, ports, or locations around campus. If no-one is using the 10Mbit link, I should be able to use it! When things get busy, my pr0n downloads should be throttled back.
That was fucking hillarious.. and true too.
I hate the morons who assume that Kazaa is only for illegal stuff. dumbasses.
If the school dose not want some kid putting her home movies up for DL they better damn well say so when he applies. Yes, your home movies could be just as hotly DLed as any StarWars DVD if you were a CamWhore.
Because some users are using file sharing, cap EVERYONE's bandwidth. That way people sharing files will continue to impact users who just want to browse the web. I went to UMass, which was blindsided by Napster. I remember it came out in the fall of 99, and by spring semester the network was basically unusable for even web browsing. Reducing the entire bandwidth to the dorms wouldn't have helped at all, you see.
What your school needs is to restrict the bandwidth for each student. Your hardware probably doesn't support that, but it's a much better solution than just capping the entire dorms' connection. That just makes the problem worse for people who just want to use the web and get their e-mail.
Yep, that kicked in around the very late 90s (until which point JANet had been charging flat rate, or the University Computing Service had been absorbing the variation, but either way the individual colleges and departments didn't take the hit).
Perhaps slightly surprisingly, it wasn't the zillions of us playing Quake II over the 'net that did it. We were generally responsible enough to avoid doing so at peak times and keep it to the evenings and weekends, and many college computer officers had an informal policy of allowing such use as long as it was fair and didn't disrupt legitimate academic things.
Also perhaps surprisingly, this all predates things like Napster. Mass music interchange wasn't going on then on the scale it was until a few months ago.
What did it was the Warez servers blatantly running on university networks. They knew where they were, of course, and for legal reasons closed them down every now and then. But a certain type of hax0r dudez just kept abusing the system. So, now small groups or individuals get charged, caps are in place, traffic is presumably monitored, yada yada.
Sadly, and as all-too-usual, the irresponsible and downright illegal behaviour of a few has now impacted the facilities available to the rest.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm at UCONN...and our network is ridiculous. Everyone is run on a 10MBps connection that is unswitched...yes...unswitched. Anyone got a packet sniffer? There are hundreds of fiber lines running beneath the streets, but none do any good because of all of the packet collisions. (My hub's orange light stays on constantly) I got kicked off the network for using too much of the network's INTERNAL bandwidth, nothing off campus, just inter-dorm transfers...Anyone got a hundred extra 64 port managed switches I could borrow? It might help...
It boggles my mind to think that these kids got into a university and don't understand that downloading the new N'sync album before it's on store shelves is illegal.
Your an idiot if you think that's all that Kazaa is used for.. just because copyrighted material is the only think you can find on Kazaa dose not mean that copyrgihted material is all that's passing though the network.
If one female student with voyuristic tendancies and an existing internet following (a camwhore) were to put up some home movies of herself you would get every bit as much trafic as from a student putting up a StarWars DVD.
The schools policy on bandwidth and copyright infringment need to be distinct regulations.. and have unrelated inforcment. If the record company complains about some one you go talk to him and get him to stop. If someone uses too much bandwidth you talk to him and get him to stop.
btw> My experence is that most schools are just plain cheap and unwilling to purchase reasonable amounts of bandwidth. My undergrad instatution never ever has serious bandwidth problems and they have no firewall and no filtering. The only time they do have a problem is when some kid descided to host a web based pirate site. This is less then one person per year and they just ask the guy to stop it.
Here at OSU, we the students are on the Residental Computing Network. Now this last year, even though enrolement was up, the university cut the amount of bandwidth for students. We are capped at 8 megs from 8 am-6 pm and 10 the rest of the time and on weekends.
So what did rcn do, to assure people would be able to use the net? They put in packet shaping software that basically kills all file sharing programs. Never mind the fact that I get a 2000 ping in Counter-Strike, and I can't ssh anywhere. Atleast someone, somewhere can browse the web and download their p0rn at full speed.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I recognized everything on the chart except AfterLife. Google hasn't been too helpful finding anything, what is AfterLife?
Wow, I thought it was bad here. They blocked all incoming ports from off of campus. Not a big deal. They capped our upload, no biggie, they capped our download (ick).
I would be willing to say pay $100 - $200 a year extra for 'premium' internet access... cap me at a higher limit.... instead of 1.5mbps, cap me at 2.5mbps, that would make me happy. Also, dont block all of my damned ports.... give me a handfull so I can ssh to my box from remote...
How many people would be willing to drop a couple of hundred per semester for 'premium' internet access? I know I sure would...
With all this talk of allotting only a fraction of available bandwidth to residences, I thought I'd share what my University decided to do. They have a 13Mb connection to the Internet (that maxes out at 10.8Mb due to ATM overhead, but they pay for 13Mb) over OC-3c with the rest of the fibre used to connect to CA-Net. Since the porn vortex that is residence was using the vast majority of the bandwidth, they limited residence (~2000 students) to 3Mb total. They didn't bother allowing them access to the CA-Net connection and they didn't allow them unlimited access to the campus network. The result was that few people could even access their course webpages (hosted on campus) never mind browse off-campus websites. I guess they tried their best.
I also run a research project in the engineering faculty there. We want to do a few projects with the fat, low-latency CA-Net pipe. Administration is not even capable of providing a wire map, or any information about what kind of equipment is between our office and the border router. Who makes the border router? Who knows. Can't even get that. Our projects would be latency sensitive ones, VoIP being an example, and how would we know where latency is introduced? It's no wonder that they use less than 5% of the CA-Net link at any given time. No building has better than 10Mb to the border, never mind an individual office or lab, even if you volunteer to pay for it.
I've been a student living on campus for a year and a half now, and the university network has had problems like this the whole time I've been here. It's gotten better with the addition of a squid proxy server (which people have managed to tunnel through with SOCKS somehow) and then this year a packet shaper.
I've been trying to implement an internal file sharing system for my peers, but I need one that only allows access from our specific subnets. I've tried the gnutella private network option in LimeWire, however that did not seem to stop people from outside our network from connecting or grabbing files from it.
Does anyone know of any currently existing software that can be configured to keep what we deem outside traffic from connecting to it which uses the peer to peer model? This would greatly alleviate bandwidth usage since I'm sure people inside the network already have files that keep getting pulled through the pipe, it's just a matter of finding them on the LAN. (we have multiple subnets and no WINS, so samba shares offer a limited solution) Something that runs on both Linux and Win32 would be nice, but I'm sure a win32 app like this could be run with WINE.
Perhaps someone has already modified the open-sourced LimeWire for this purpose?
Penn State recently capped downloads. There's and article here. The interesting thing is the fact that 247 students(1.6%) use 46% of the bandwidth.
As for Morpheus and Gnutella... I'm a college student. I'm not rich, and I'm tired of price gouging ($500 for BOOKS!!!!! COME ON!!!!). It is a natural response to it. Leave it be.
PS, If anyone from University of Kentucky IT is reading this, North Campus would kill for a T3 right now.
Universities should ban personal spiders. Those dudes in their dorm rooms with their caps on backwards have no conception of what it's like for a nonprofit site with tens of thousands of pages of free, noncommercial content.
.edu domain because we're so ticked off.
They sic their personal spider on our site instead of using our site search engine, and download thousands of cross-links. We can get hit as often as 15 times per second from a single surfer, and sometimes end up blocking the entire
Never had a customer from a university anyway who is interested paying for serious content. Bunch of freeloaders, they are....
I go to school at The Wentworth Institute of Technology and the internet connection is great because it was well thought out and executed. We are a small school in Boston with about 1200 kids on campus and 3300 total. All dorms and classrooms have a switched 10/100mbs connection, the dorm and classroom buildings are linked to each other and the network operations center with gigabit over fiber. Our school has a limited DS3 which is suprisingly adequate. The reason is: they use bandwith shaping at the firewall to adjust the amount of peer to peer file sharing programs that get through. This makes everyone happy, good response from web sites and you can still use the P2P programs. I can routinely get approxomately 600KB/s from downloads from FilePlanet.com.
Pray tell, what does 'inspite' mean?
Perhaps you meant to use a spelling or grammar checker. The turn of phrase you're looking for is "in spite of", meaning "although use of Napster has dropped, [bandwidth use is still high]".
Make that North American, because here at McMaster (Ontario, Canada) more than a third of our outbound bandwidth is eaten by file-sharing utilities. Sadly, we only have a 7-Mbit pipe here, and things generally crawl.. but that's another story. I guess this could be construed as a consequence of training the youth to consume media. Just like people will flood movie theatres to see the next movie they'll also use any other means to get their media fix. I find the Movie, Gaming, and Music communities' frustration over services such as Napster, Gnutella, $LatestTrendInFileSharing to be amusing in that the very masses that they 'hooked' onto their media are now eating their way into their profit margin in some sort of consumer feeding frenzy. Napster, Gnutella are the holy grail of consumerism because in our culture the bottom line is the dollar, and what better deal can you get than a free one?
?-|||-----x<*))))><
I'm both a student (undergrad) and an employee of my University, and I've watched with interest the bandwidth problems we've experienced over the past year and a half. As a student in the dorms, last fall I watched as the dorm internet connection went to shit. Now, at first I was rather ticked off that I couldn't download all my songs movies and games, but then I went to work one afternoon and found that the ENTIRE Univ network was nerfed.
I spent some time calling around to various computer and network services groups on campus to find out what was going on, and I got the same answer every time; "The ResNet is flooding the entire network offline" This wasn't cool, not in the least... It wasn't just the students who were being hit hard by this, the entire University was unable to conduct normal work.
Now, even though I couldn't surf the web for the latest news on whatever game I was waiting for at the time or IM my friends to see what was going on that night, what was more of an irritation was the fact that I couldn't get my work done. And I had to deal with tons of users who didn't understand that it wasn't within my power to restore net service.
I've been dealing with fellow students for the past year who do nothing but bitch and complain about the net connection being slow. All I hear is people blaming the University for not giving students the bandwidth they're paying for (The semester fee of $50 goes toward reshall connections, lab use, technical support, network maint. etc...) and so on. Students need to realize that they aren't the end-all-be-all of the Univ system, granted they're the primary source of income, but they have to also realize that their chat privledges and music downloading does NOT take precidence over legitmate academic work.
So, in response to problems, the Univ has capped the max speed of the reshalls (50mbs total) and set 1.5GB upload and 1.5GB download limits that only apply to traffic that leaves the network. Students need to learn how to use their net connection with fairness and responsibility. I've heard complaints about the download limits from people yelling things like "What if I want to download several Linux ISOs?" They don't realize we have a mirror server that has all the latest files on the internal network.
To all students who are currently fuming over whatever their university is doing, until you have the proper technical background to be able to suggest viable solutions to the problem, sit down, and kindly shut up as you're doing nothing but flooding the network admins inboxes with emails that they have to read when they would be better off working on the problem.
-Z
was the main example cited by the article, dude!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Despite what they say, its not just filesharing thats bogging down the networks. for two weeks after school began this year for me i was without a school internet connection because everyone uses the internet all of the time now. Instant messanger, email, voice and videoconferencing, websites (flash etc) an other things have taken over the bandwidth. There is just too much you can do on the inbternet now.
I agree with the 90%/10% ratio of bandwidth usage for people who are using it for file sharing versus more legitimate means, However, that doesn't say that I agree with limiting the available resources to students. In an ideal educational setting, I see that resources are just an afterthought to the main purpose of experimenting and creating new ideas and frontiers. What about those few hackers that are sitting at terminals, thinking of ways to bring high quality content to the masses? Intertwining video with embedded code? Watermarking audio to encapsulate neilson-esque ratings? These sorts of ideas need high bandwidth to experiment with because you never know what the future will hold if you allow the resources to be there for them.
It's come up before where someone gets a bandwidth and they exceed their bandwidth quota or get blackholed from the mail server. People have also been cut for codered/nimda. In the event of any of these problems, support teams are informed of this and the user just has to make an appointment. This isn't always the case, we don't get copies of every warning, but if someone gets 3 warnings and gets cut down before they go for help, there's nothing to do but laugh. Besides, ZoneAlarm=free, antivirus= $20 or free trial. Oh, and WindowsUpdate is free too.
As for ignorance of policy or a problem or anything else, they are responsible for checking penn state email which can be forwarded, checked on the web, but that's just being dumb if they don't do that.
>Theft is theft, no matter who you're screwing over
Yeah, but the dictionary explains theft isn't copying files. Just read it. Theft, or its identical but clearly defined brother, larceny only applies when a physical item has been removed from the posession of another. In other words, the violated no longer has posession of the item.
Yup, I know about the law definition of posession. Of course, since this applies only to the violated and their product is still in their hands with their rightful ownership intact it still doesn't count.
Now, walking into NSync's house and stealing all their papers with their ideas for their next album is the only copyright violation I can come up with on the spot that is also theft.
However, fortunately KaZaa can't do that (yet)!
>and didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal
No, leaving it on all day is not illegal. Perhaps against your AUP, but breaking an agreement between student and university is not illegal. That's why he can't go to jail or get community service for abusing your bandwidth in any way he likes.
Or do you mean that trading the Nsync album is illegal? There's a big difference between the medium and the message, you know. Just ask the art department.
I don't disagree with your actions, but unfortunately it seems the BSA has caught another computer professional up in their redefinition of the english language. Don't let it happen! Fight the power and keep the dictionary true to its roots! Copying copyrighted files without permission is copyright violation. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can say piracy. This word, however, is intentionally both overused and loaded. I'm sure you and me both don't consider a software "pirate" someone who goes to coastal villiages and nearby ships to rape women and pillage.
Sorry, don't take this all too seriously. I just think that when people stop calling piracy theft (which it isn't) people will see that the crime committed is nowhere near the level the RIAA would consider it.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
While it is shared bandwidth, and should not be used for illegal sharing, it should NOT block legitimate purposes. College is a time to encourage innovation and trying new things, not worring about getting kicked out for trying a new OS or two.
A funny note, last month I found an fserve on #isoparadise running on a library computer, thus getting around the dorm bottleneck :)
You need some throttling to hold back the few percent of the user population who will suck up all available bandwidth, but the practical cap is maybe 10x the median.
As a technical matter, I hate packet drop as a throtting measure. Packet reordering is much more effective at throttling TCP, especially for long TCP connections.
[I used to do network congestion research. I invented "fair queueing", discovered "congestion collapse", and was the first to describe the "tragedy of the commons" problem for networks. I introduced all three of those phrases to networking. See the RFCs that bear my name. So I do know something about this, although I got out of networking and into graphics years ago. J. Nagle]
I attend a University in California, and I've been warned about high bandwidth usage as well. The reasoning that students are given is about the financial costs of getting a bigger pipe. However, I bet, if you were to poll the largest users, they wouldn't mind paying more for unhassled usage of the internet.
Moreover, I'm constantly reminded that the AUP states that the internet connection is only to be used for educational puposes. I understand this for computer labs or offices but not in my own domicile. But then they do selective enforcement of the policy. I'm sure that nearly everyone sends personal e-mails at the least through the in-room connections. There should be a secondary AUP for dorm connections.
In fact, I would be willing to pay extra to get a cable modem or DSL (not to mention digital cable) in the dorm if possible. Even dial-up is prohibited for the phone lines. However, that has already been given monopoly rights to University organizations. Talk about barrier to entry for other companies.
Right now, universities are trying to stop the filesharing by crippling the network in a way that degrades students' machines to clients. They put students into a consumer role which I think is the direct opposite of educating them.
The first step is slowing or blocking known filesharing ports and protocols. Users will find a way around this (they'll download the next generation of filesharing tools). So then inbound connections will be blocked. That removes all peer to peer capability, at least for connection based protocols.
Encrypted channels below the TCP level remove the ability to filter based on content or protocols, because attributes like port numbers and protocol headers are hidden inside the encrypted stream. In the long run, if you want to have separate limitations for filesharing and other traffic, you will have to disallow encryption, or at least stop inbound connections, which, depending on the tunnel protocol, can be impossible without completely blocking that protocol.
When the point is reached that filesharing is "impossible", the network will be web only. The bad thing about that is the message: The internet is the web, the web is what bigger entities serve and you consume. (All peer to peer had to be removed to stop filesharing, but that's known only to historians.)
Is there a better way? I think so. Don't cripple the network technologically, but involve students in the economics of the net.
Take a look at the DFN pricelist.
Category 15 is a 622 MBit connection with a volume cap of 50000 GB/month. The price per year is 741373 Euro. That is down to 1.24 Euro (about 1,10 US-$) a GB.
At that price, most students would be happy to pay for the used bandwith, if that meant no more "you can't do this, you can't do that". Offer 1 or 2 GB per week free, charge for anything exceeding that and offer some means by which the user can monitor and limit his/her bandwith usage and everyone but the most hardcore filesharers will be happy.
Fuck you. Honestly. Fuck you. What gives you the right to dictate how my tuition dollars should be spent? Are you paying for my tuition, room & board, fees, books, etc? No - I am. Not financial aid & not my parents - I am.
I'm a Systems Analysis major and do you know how many classes I have that have computers in them for the students? Zero. Not this semester at least, and I have two programming classes. Why not? Because we're doing a lot of theoretical stuff and discussion, rather than coding. Furthermore, why go to the library to get online, when I have a much faster computer in my room? And, email for file sharing??? What the hell planet are you on? First, most servers limit the size of attachments and second, it's inefficient as hell! Did it ever occur to you that all of this "ridiculous" file sharing, whether it be through Napster, Gnutella, or good ol' fashioned FTP, is useful to the learning process? Maybe a lot of the English majors who would otherwise only use word processing and email, now understand about file transferring, boolean searches, and general bandwidth issues a little bit better. Maybe I benefit from being able to run and FTP server and play around with it, and in doing so - learn about it.
Also, pherhaps it's nice for a poor college student to be able to entertain themselves with new and interesting things on a PC they've already paid for, through bandwidth they've already paid for. It beats getting yourself deeper into debt. Finally, if file sharing doesn't educate students about the ins-and-outs of copyright law and the ideas and concepts behind intellectual property, I don't know what will.
no text
was that:
'insatiable demand for bandwidth.'
or
'demand for bandwidth to download insatiable.'
Just keep keep chanting the martra:
Porn Drives Technological Innovation
if you're unsure.
An just to put a bit of historical spin on this:
While sitting in Baroque and Renaissancehistory art history class needed to fill one of the way too many electives required for those pursuing technical tracks in college during the mid 80s, I distinctly remember the prof. saying that artists concerved their paints that reproduced human flesh tone for the pornographic mural of their rich merchant patrons rather than waste them for their ecclesiastic sponsors, who were looking for more of surreal, otherwordly look.
People like you are The Problem with society.
You could just act responsibly, but instead, you'd rather some external agent automatically force you. This is exactly why we have so many laws, including the bad ones like DMCA and the coming SSSSCA.
So many problems would go away if you people went away.
If you connect 3000 people with 10Mbit connections, you should be able to support 30,000Mbits of bandwidth.
How is this any different from the ISP's in 1996 on T1 having 60 lines and hosting their "webspace" as well as the ISP's page off the same line?
If all 60 lines were saturated with 28800's it would be bad, if they were saturated 56K's it would still be running slower than 28800.
If Video-on-Demand, Video-phones, Voice over IP and stuff is to take off, there has to be an end to overselling bandwidth globally.
If you look at it the other way, if they are connected by 10Mbits, cap the individual users at whatever is sustainable, they'll complain, but at least it doesn't slow down the network, nor will you have to do packet seek-and-destroy on stealth port rotation. Ultimately, limiting the bandwidth to whatever is sustainable (a 300 user dorm with 100mbit connections but only 10 mbit outside is still overselling.)
Everyone assumes that people will only use their internet connection 5% of the time. Wrong.
Morpheus/KaZZa,Bearshare/Gnutella,eDonkey, and Napster/WinMX type networks do have bandwidth limiting features in them... what there needs to be is some way for these programs to know what the maximum bandwidth they can use is. By default all of the programs are set to unlimited bandwidth, so they just keep using bandwidth.
The same problem happens with Cable Modem users. One person in the neighbourhood can saturate the entire up and downstream pipe... The Cable companies simply capped the upstream and downstream bandwidth.
Paying per MB is a joke... if you are paying per MB, there is a lot of junk bandwidth that is wasted by spam, trojan scans, DDoS scanning/targeting, even Win9X/NT 's NetBIOS wastes bandwidth looking for other Network Neighbourhood computers every few seconds. Paying per MB only works if you can turn the pipe off (like water/electricty/gas), most people don't realize that leaving their computer on with a cable modem is the same as leaving all their lights on in their house when the leave(in comparison to electricity.)
People should pay for the size of the pipe, and when they have that pipe they are free to saturate it or rarely use it. The ISP,POP and whatnot should never oversell bandwidth.
AOL is the guiltiest of them all for overselling bandwidth.
Well, it's a university. The last thing you should expect, is that the people would be able to learn. ;-)
OTOH, if you did something transparent, like, say, having a caching proxy, then they would still end up using your local copy instead of the connection outside, and it would even work for uninformed and irresponsible people.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I believe that some places are doing blocking, and I think the blocking is a bad idea for very much the reasons you state.
My proposal is different from blocking the ports. I merely want to give preference to other traffic. Assume for the moment that a university has a T3 (I know, that's not much bandwidth anymore, but I happen to know the numbers for that). So there is about 45Mbits/sec of bandwidth. Now assume that you and one other guy are using the net, he is streaming some data from a telescope and has a demand of 22Mbits/sec. You are grabbing a NetBSD ISO from a P2P network and also want 22Mbits/sec. Without traffic shaping you would both get right about 22Mbit/sec for a total of 44Mbit/sec. With my proposed traffic shaping you also both get 22Mbit/sec since there is 45Mbit/sec available. Now lets say I show up and want to use 22Mbits/sec to download CivIII. In the ideal world I'll get 1Mbit/sec and the two of you will both stay at 22Mbit/sec (unless I am really going to use CivIII in some educational manner). As I proposed it you and I get 11.5Mbit/sec and the telescope guy sticks at 22Mbits/sec.
Not blocked, but there is an implicit assumption that the file sharing traffic is less important the the other traffic, one that isn't totally fair, but it probably as good as it gets.
That clearly isn't my intent, just to make sure the other traffic gets first crack at the bandwidth.
Hmmm, now who has:
I know, cheap blow.
That doesn't seem too bad either. I have nothing against that solution. In fact it can co-exist with the traffic shaping. You can give some amount of shaped bandwidth for "free" with normal dorm fees, and allow people to buy more non-shaped bandwidth at market rates (which may include fees above what you quoted for equipment and other things).
I don't know how many people would be happy with it and how many would not view it as an escape from being hemmed in, but another excuse to nickel and dime them to death, but that's what pilot studies are for :-)
Come on, guys!
Freenet is the way to go! It's anonymous, so the legal precedence of plausible deniability behave in full force, and it (GASP!) caches content to keep bandwidth usage low!
So, it will anonymously work with the pron and mp3s, as well as any other type of P2P content, while keeping the hammering of the "big pipe" to a minimum!
Duh...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Most colleges' dorm rooms are all connected to a T1 or better via a 10/100 network, and the students have unlimited access free of charge, but the bandwidth for individual users is limited during peak times so that people using it for ligitimate purposes (which accounts for what, 0.01% of the total usage?) can get enough bandwidth.
I'm going to look up the bandwith to student ratios before I decide which colleges/universities to apply to.
Anyway, you can get plenty of porn on a 56k unless you want long porno movies. Warez requires a lot more bandwidth than porn. Most mp3s are encoded at 128kilobits/sec, so you can download them faster than you can listen to them with less bandwith than cable or DSL.
Repeal the DMCA!
get around the cap they've put on kazaa/morpheus traffic? At my school (Clemson) we aren't limited for web or ftp transfers, but they've significantly slowed down file-sharing stuff (to the point where downloads happen at a blazing 10k/sec). Is there anything I can do? Oh well, maybe I'll pull out my nice C64 300 baud modem in the meantime....
Like, schools for the deaf :)
I spent my summer at the Harvard University and on the first day, when I set up my connection I downloaded 20 mb in about 2 seconds. The connection there is extremely good and I talked to a Harvard cs-graduate who told me, that Harvard still has an enormous amount of spare bandwidth left.
I am sure I will get my butt severely kicked by my net admin if I tried to download a Linux iso from outside. Mirroring is the king here.
Due to the very small pipe that we've got (we are amongst the bottom of internet bandwidth scale throughout major universities in Asia-Pacific according to the now dysfunction Asian weekly survey last year), we cannot afford to download anything big. We are in CSE/EEE. In a dept with about 700 person, only 2-3 staff member are authorised to download something as big as an iso. All the others need to use the internal mirror.
Student needs to pay from their own account for using internet (NZ$0.4/MB). Staff and PhD students has "unlimited" internet access (ie, you will get cut off if *monthly* download > 100MB). It is much less than ideal. But, we somehow survive. ;-)
Like many here on Slashdot, I came from college away with a need for high speed bandwidth. Not only am I not alone, the ranks are growing. Each year, students with a need for speed leave looking for residences that offer these conveniences. Where a small number of individuals in their mid-30's consider bandwidth a necessity many of us in our early to mid 20's consider it a requirement of our living spaces. In my own case, high speed access was a requirement when looking for an apartment, (wireless 100KB both up and down, nice). Complexes outside of college towns are beginning to take notice as they begin to string CAT 5 through their buildings. In addition, many home builders are getting into the act with prewiring the homes with CAT 5 where traditionally they would drop CAT 2 and 3 for phones. While the bandwidth market won't take off tomorrow like so many had hoped "AT&T wireless, CLECs, etc." Give it 10 years when individuals like myself are ready to buy homes, THEN we will see the broadband revolution we were promised over the past few years.
HT
These are some wonderful little boxes that can rate limited protocols. It is a step in the right direction. Our school is getting ready to purchase the Enterprise edition to keep up with demand. And the report generation facilities are pretty impressive.
A great box that will rate limit by protocol. Not a prefect solution, but pretty darn close.
There are other P2P networks out there that make kazaa look like a pipsqueaks toy.
:)
The 'problem' is that people set up their sharing to max (hey, college line, no BW problems, right? Heh) and end up sharing far more then most other users on the P2P network. People need to realize that 3 or 4 download slots open is more then enough, bleh.
::yawns:: besides, private FTP accounts are so much more entertaining.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Is the next big thing happening and cosnsuming lots of univesity cycles.
All those 2 GB files, a couple hundred times those music files, take InterNet II capacity to push about in reasonable time.
What's the big deal, just use all the bandwidth that I'm not getting! And everybody else with 56k modems... Boy, I can't wait for my ISP to support v.92, ZDNet says that that will make my modem fast as DSL! :)
The mail volume of a 1000 students using plain text for their mails uses as much diskspace and bandwith as approximatly 50 to 80 students using a wordprocessor to send or get their messages.
Not to mention the time lost on formatting the damn thing.
The same for anybody else...
Now that would be a gain.
And I am not calculating the fatties Word is producing.
--------
* Sigh *
A good portion of the posts by students are their tales of woe about not being able to share gigs of porn and MP3s. Big fucking deal. The fees for your semester's worth of internet access isn't higher than what I pay in the same period for a cable modem. Stop being whiny bitches. I think legitimate uses also fall short of downloading a new Linux ISO every day. No matter what you think you need, you don't REALLY need a new Linux ISO every day. There's also a good chance your school's got a mirror on their internal network somewhere of all the ISOs you could want. If you need an update use apt-get or some other installer program with FTP support for fetching new RPMs. You might talk to some network admins to see if they would provide a mirror for said FTP so you wouldn't have to go outside the network to keep your system up to date. Browsing the web and playing counter strike or Quake all day long is easily legitimate because it isn't going to put you over any quotas. As for admins, put mirrors of stuff like Linux ISOs and FTPs on boxes in the internal network and advertise them to students so they know they don't have to tax your internet connection to get them. Also set up HTTP caching proxies at the head end the dorms or library or whatever hooks up to. It will offload stress on your outgoing connection to the net by a good deal.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Are there any ways to get network services to listen to us?
Easy, drop the dime anonymously on them to the RIAA and some large record companies, telling them about the horrendous copyright violations you have witnessed.
When the head of networks sees the Tour Bus full of RIAA ambulance chasers enter the car park, you see him running for the internet router armed with a fireaxe.
Curmudgeon
I recently graduated from an ivy league school which is suffering from the same bandwidth issues described, even with dual OC-3's (one for Internet II). After discovering that > 50% of the bandwidth usage of these lines was from the dorms, the university responded by capping both upload and download bandwidth to all the dorms. As a result, my speed off an OC-3 was SLOWER than a 56k modem.
Yes, I suppose that I should be grateful that my school let me run web/ftp/gaming servers from my room. But what's the point of "being able" to do these things when the bandwidth restrictions cripple these services to the point that they're not even useful? When I'm paying $35,000 a year for my education, I should be able to download all the porn, warez, music, whatever that I want without anyone complaining that I'm using "too much" bandwidth. At the very least I should be able to get speeds equivalent to those on the capped cable modem I'm using right now.
In the school that I went to, the undergrad dorm resident's bandwidth got capped, even though our tuition money was being used to support the university's various grad schools and to subsidize all sorts of other unnecessary things on campus. Maybe it's time for schools to consider what resources their students are actually using and spend the money in those areas, rather than complaining that students are using more bandwidth than they are "entitled to".
our internet access just fucking sucks. There's no organized quota system to speak of, but the bandwidth just isn't there. Everyone is stuck at speeds around 4k/sec during evenings, better at off-peak. We set up Limewire to connect only to computers within the campus network, and we get lickety-split LAN speeds. It's kewl and actually lets us get what we need. IT staffers really appreciate that solution...
--hongpong.com
Of course the demand for bandwith is increasing! HELLO?! Everyone and their dog brings their own computers now, and there are computers ALL over the campuses. Why in the world wouldn't the demand be rising?
In fact many schools are requiring you to either buy or rent a computer, for the entire time of your education there. This shouldn't even be news at all...
The students do not exist for the school; the school exists for the students. They are the customer, and should be the boss.
Part of the problem is that schools are very socialist. Typically students pay an activity fee and get all college services for free or for a niggling cost. This is wrong. They should be able to opt out of that which they don't desire, and pay only for what they want. When I was in school, part of my fee went to the football team. I never attended a game. I never wanted to see grown men wearing spandex and slapping one another's rears. So why pay for it? OTOH, I used the campus gun locker to store my rifle, and I used the network extensively, and I enjoyed going to Springfest. I should have paid individually for those things.
Schools should charge students for bandwidth used. If a student wishes, he can go for the cheap-but-slow plan, or ante up and get more bang for more bucks. We Have the Technology. This is right, just and fair. Honestly, most folks don't need more than maybe 128kbps max. Some people want more than that. Let them pay.
But the attitude that the students exist as a nuisance to the school is foolish, for without them there would be no network, no sysadmins and no college. The customer is always right--even when he's wrong. And the students are your customer. They do not exist at your sufferance: you do at theirs.
Now, if the student damages school property, or allows his GPA to slip too low &c., then that is a horse of another colour entirely...
Why not implement a "bandwidth on a curve"-type solution? A given student gets 1.5GB/day traffic. Exceed that, and their bandwidth is halved every 500 megabytes, in addition to them getting email warnings and a temporary selective block being put on their connection. The block would block the greatest use of bandwidth (for that student) for that day; i.e. Kazaa, FTP, etc. Also, students who are detected as generating a lot of outgoing traffic would have that service or port limited to, say, 256Kbps (or lower) until they go by the office and buy a 'Server Connection' availible in various forms; i.e. $100/mo for a T1-grade outgoing, etc.
.isos) could pay a $20-50 one-time fee for unlimited traffic at a certain speed.
In addition, students who desired to use an awful lot of bandwidth on a certain day (i.e. new version of Linux comes out, gotta grab those
Not only would this remedy the big bandwidth issues (10% of students using 90% of bandwidth would generate enough money to buy more bandwidth) it wouldn't generate all the complaints of more draconian (disconnect heavy users) measures.
This
Actually, they are. Who pays for the lion's share of the school? They do. Where would the school be without them? Nowhere. Are they responsible to the administration? No, and they should not be--they are the customer. Is the administration repsonsible to them? No, but it should be.
No other industry steps upon its customers like academia does. The school's services, including the network, are bought buy the students. They obviously want more bandwidth--buy it. And charge them for it. But, and here's just a little hint, don't socialise the cost across everyone. It's wrong to make CS students pay for the football team, and wrong to make Sally Off-campus and Joe Email pay for Ted MP3's music habit. Do like the telcos do--give the students various rate plans.
If any other industry treated its clients like the university system does, then there'd be a lot of bankrupt companies. I'm glad that I am in the real world, where I can pay for what I want, don't pay for what I don't want (well, except for taxes) and am free.
Direct upstream bandwith isn't the problem here, it's the volume. The 622 MBit pipe can carry about 200 TB per month (or 100 TB if you count only the day and not the night), but the price for that connection is paid depending on the volume transmitted. Unlimited use costs twice as much as using it only up to 12.5 TB a month. Giving the rest of the available bandwith to low-priority protocols won't solve the problem, because the connection would still be overused.
To make things more difficult there are of course political problems to watch out for, if you decide to selectively slow down filesharing. Should you succeed, why shouldn't someone from the various Associations ask network administrators to use that power and prevent copyright violations alltogether? Treating network traffic as opaque, either because it is encrypted or because you don't have the necessary hardware to treat it differently, could keep the Universities out of a lot of trouble.
There is some shaping going on here, but it affects all traffic depending on source, not protocols. If you were to implement selective traffic shaping as the only measure against net-hogs, they would probably "hide" their traffic inside other protocols. Remember that in an uncapped situation usually only a few users spoil the fun for everyone by drastically overusing their priviledge.
I think you understood the difference between the two types of "being a consumer", but I'll try to clarify for those who didn't: There's nothing wrong with paying for what you use, but students should be given the opportunity to participate in communication on equal terms, instead of being forced to consume what others offer, which would be the result of reducing their computers to webclients.
Yep, glad I didn't choose that dorm network admin position I got offered there... I knew I would have to put up with that kind of BS.
mr. trudging through snow uphill both ways..
The undergrads at Stanford, for instance, are required to pay about $8000/quarter tuition, in addition to about $900/month room and board. What they get for that room and board money is (the plans vary) two meals a day and half of a small room with a sink and a closet. Many students --depending on their seniority-- are required to live in these rat holes.
You seem to think they are eating caviar and lounging in spas.
For all that money, they damn well better get gold plated 1MB/s bandwidth. Instead, the optical ring around campus is already stopped up on high traffic times, and download speeds are routinely around 5-6Kbytes/second.
You say they're spoiled, I say they're getting screwed.
And to those who laud schools which firewall out IM clients, or who complain about use of pr0n, remember: it's not like the terminal at your work. These people live on campus. They're adults, and they are paying a lot more per unit of square foot than 90% of the (non-student) slashdot crowd. Let them use the internet and download whatever the hell they want in their off-times. Just like you do, even though you are paying less.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I attend Northeastern Univeristy, where Shawn Fanning created Napster originally. Although Shawn dropped out to pursue Napster full time, during Napster's peak, our Northeastern continued to allow access to Napster, as to not bring too much attention if they denied access (avoiding headlines of "Home of Napster Blocks Napster" etc). However over the last fall, with all the students returning, file sharing programs put so much strain on the network, access to many gnutella and KaZaa etc exchanges were blocked. They are attempting to fix the problem now by installing a larger bandwith pipe, but the trouble over the fall was severe. I'm a little suprised it wasn't mentioned in the NY Times article.
Lets see..They send out thousands of press releases, and all of their "research" seems to revolve around an MPAA/RIAA position. Umm, can you say "Industry Front Group"?
See, it's like this: Legit groups generally don't have the resources to hire huge public relations companies to do massive campaigns for them to get their stories in publications (hits). Those with large amounts of corporate backing (IE: cash) do.
Have a nice day,
Salt
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
i think i am going to this school next semester, i have to deal with this *sshole! hey, look at how other schools are dealing, and try to model your approach after the things shown here. slowing a port as it reaches a daily bandiwth cap is a nice one, as is capping the dorms during teaching hours. but this all students are theives, and need to be supervised and have any non-academic data kept from them is not only utter bullsh*t, but also completely against what what the university is all about. this is they're HOME. is should feel like one, not a prison.
I pay approximately $400/month for my cave at RIT. I can see by the size of my room that most of that money is fueling the warez scene on campus (biggest in the us hurray!). Now since I'm paying that much money, I'm glad to see that I now have lan access to just about everything prior to it's legal release.
Kind of funny how 6 people got busted here and our download usage dropped to almost nothing during the night hours. Now that we're in the new year the scene has started back up and we're using about 135mbit/sec of our oc3.
/me pets the OC3
"as i see it, the problem lies in students' view of computers as music storage devices rather than tools to do classwork."
Keeping in mind that the corporate world (MS,Creative,etc,etc,etc) all promote that amongst others. Your computer isn't just a computer it's a media managment and entertainment system. Think of all those ads we've seen over the years promoting the idea of a computer/TV/Radio/toaster oven. Digital convergance indeed. So there's plenty of blame in this situation and not all of it rest on the students shoulders.
"On a side note, my schools admins commented to me once that 60% of the capacity Internet2 is being used for file sharing between universities. Chew on that for a while."
Nothing really *to* chew on. The earliest days on ARPANET was the transfering of files. Not quite as chewy as todays files, but still...
Why even do it that way? Most routers on the market can do MAC cloning.
Speaking of not thinking things through. If the students start being charged for their overuse of the network. Maybe, just maybe(one can hope) that those *students* will be more responsible with what they have. Sort of the difference between a person who has daddies credit card, and a person who has to work at dennys to make the money they need.
high speed internet access is the key.
there is countless number of legitimate uses of great deals of bandwidth, particularly for university students. what if i, a media student, wanted to download my video project from my home computer, a few gigs of high quality MPEG2 video. or to transfer backups to a remote location. the list goes on and on.
the solution? don't penalise those using great deals of bandwidth for legitimate purposes--and as this is often a difficult/impossible distinction to make, don't penalise anybody. your AUP must include very severe penalties for illegitimate use, and other than that,
just stack up the pipe! more and more of it...
you can never have too much bandwidth.
What school are you attending? I'll tell you if you are or not.
We do not have daily bandwidth caps because if a student is using the network for legitimate academic purposes then we cannot stop them, as they are obeying the AUP. I never said all students were thieves, but that a very small number of them refused to follow the rules even after being informed they were breaking them. We do not supervise them, nor do we do any sort of filtering or firewalling in order to keep academic data from them. I even went as far as to say that we don't care in the least as long as they don't start impacting other users (which we usually assume to be around 2 Mb/s for more than an hour).
Regardless of whether this is their home or not, they signed an agreement. The agreement stated that they would not do certain things, just like in a real apartment or house in the real world. If your lease agreement says no cats, and then you get a cat, and they kick you out, don't complain.
" Impossible here meaning prohibitively expensive. Or maybe just rich people should get a good education?"
Considering the tuition cost I see out there. We're already well on our way to education being just for the rich.
Being a student who lives in the residence halls (how dare some of you use that bad four letter word "dorm"). Recently the univ. has taken bandwidth from the students (we used to get 500kps on downstream and about 350kps on upstream) but since Sooner Information Network (sin.ou.edu) has grown and updated to a massive portal for students and has give most of the bandwidth to this waste of space online. While it is great, other times it is slow, has mislinked pages on numerous occasions and they just love doing streaming media like crazy. They even now have an online TV show called SinTV. Course the servers also run Win2k (evil because they used to be on FreeBSD servers). All Sin has to do to get more bandwidth is just go over to the IT dept. and say, "we need more bandwidth because we are getting more traffic) they are trying to get the SIN site to become the Hub for everything on campus. It sucks for us Xbox, gamerz,and p2p users.
Cheaper to buy at the store, if 650MB of music?
;-/
Likewise a 30GB hard disk: 30000*2p = £600 -- probably more than you paid for the HD, by far.
2p/MB seems a bit steep
My efforts were focused on studying, not downloading porn or mp3s
I don't know about you, but I generall don't have 8 hours of class per day at the Uni. And in between classes, you can bet I'm prolly using the computer since it's too early to drink (at least outside the room anyway).