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."

Comments

Morpheus is the killer

[baptiste]

Sure, legitimate bandwidth use is high. But student use of bandwidth is huge.

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.

90% of the people = 10% of the bandwidth use

[reddawnman]

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

Re:90% of the people = 10% of the bandwidth use

[AnotherBlackHat]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to help with the administration of the pianos in my college, and it was much worse. Seems like the music majors consumed way over 90% of the time available, even though the other students barely touched them. More than once I was on the receiving end of complaints that there weren't enough pianos. And I heard that the swimming pool was in a worse situation, with the swim team hogging nearly 95% of that valuable resource.

The worst part was the huge number of administrators who seemed to think that the situation was completely acceptable. I would constantly hear phrases like "The equable distribution of resources does not mean everyone must use exactly equal portions.".

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