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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."
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
... 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
There's no way to stop filesharing except at the endpoints of communication. Unless the users stop wanting to use filesharing, there will always be workarounds for all the filtering and blocking you can think of. The next step is encrypted connections below tcp level, aka ad hoc virtual private networks. Since there's a heap of good reasons why one would want all traffic (even the "non-shady") encrypted anyway, universities will most likely refrain from blocking the necessary protocols. Once the traffic becomes opaque to the transport, there goes the ability to filter based on contents or protocols.
What can be done is this: Restrict bandwith or volume of data. That however will limit certain promising aspects of network development like freenet and other decentralized protocols. That's why especially universities which are supposed to be interested in innovation should think twice before crippling network access.
Dude, thats harsh, 1.5GB a week is absolutly nothing if yoou really think abut it. Thats an average of 2KB/s constant use, which you could easily pull if you ever just play internet games freqently and surf the web. Or just download 3 iso in 1 week.
But seriously what stupid network engineers put the keymcard syste on the same network? Talk about securuesity iss.
Segment the 2 networks. Install a 200MB/s cap so they can't pull faster than that. And if penalties are needed, put them at 10GB a week at least.
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.
The problem is not that students are sharing files. The problem is that students are sharing files outside the campus network. There's almost always extra bandwidth within the dorms. If a school were to encourage some method of sharing that first tried to download from within the campus, the vast majority of desired files would be found within the dorms, and the external bandwidth usage would diminish. Of course, such a pragmatic approach would make the stop-it-all crowd very unhappy, so it is unlikely to ever be implemented.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
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
didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal,
Hello! Why would leaving Kazaa running all day be illegal?!
I think you're making some interesting conclusions about legal precidents which have yet to be set. Now, I could buy that explicitly downloading something which is copyrighted is a violation of copyright (assuming that no other provision, e.g. licensing, has been made), but you're way out on a limb otherwise.
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
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