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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."
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);
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
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
Actually nothing in college is free, you really pay for everything. Spend 4 years in one and you'll be amazed at the high cost of everything. And with every year they're raising tuitions you ought to expect to get something for the thousands you're forking out each year ..and some each month.
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?"
I know what you mean. For several years now, the University of South Carolina (the original USC) has been charging all full-time students a "technology fee", which was ostensibly so the university could make all the dorm rooms "Internet ready". Needless to say, when they actually got within eyesight of that goal, they promptly decided to (1) build more dorms, and (2) redefine what the fee goes for.
What always bothered me most about the campus computer setup was how the Business Administration department got new computers every year while the C.S. department and College of Engineering had to wait every four or five years before they could get new computers.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I am currently at durham university.
The IT Service, only have a few college rooms cabled up. I had one last term, but not this term. What you get is 10Mb/s but ALL web is forced through a proxy server. This is not transparant, but rather blocking outgoing ports. MSN works if you put in the address of the proxy server, and audiogalaxy will figure out the proxy settings. You can ssh out, and in from/to anywhere, and with port forwarding, this is very useful. The ITS NT machines in the computer rooms, are even worse. You get a VNC server running all the time as a service. I am expecting a visit from the director of ITS dressed in a black suit brandishing a gun.
Noooo. Dont sho..........
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.
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
Oh,dear boy, you had it easy, why back in my day we used beads carved from rock with holes chipped inside so they could be fashioned on spun strings. We had slaves to slide the beads according to set rules. In fact, it was a dangerous job due to the overwhelming number of beads required for basic computational analysis. To calculate prime numbers, MMMCX tons of beads were required and a failure of the supporting members meant an avalanche of rolling beads upon the camp. Begin worker's rights and other heretic movements that impeded technology.
But I digress. You young whippersnappers think you have it so good with silicon, you ought to try pushing carts of beads uphill by the bucket uphill both ways with no round wheels.
What next, UCLA is rally the University of Central Louisiana? MIT is the Michigan Institute of Technology? CMU is Collge of Medicine of Utah? :-)
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?
Bandwidth isn't free to get from the backbone provider, it can't be free to the user, there's no such thing as free. Maybe the access should be free but the bandwidth isn't, so what they should be doing is limiting the speeds or amount one can use.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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]
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.
I don't mind paying for there to be computers in the library or the classrooms, and I don't even mind paying for legitimate internet usage. I do mind paying for your classmates using a bigger pipe than many of us grown-ups can afford for illegal activities. Oh yeah, piracy is still illegal.
Hope you enjoy the big pipe.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
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
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.
"The real problem probably comes from file-sharing programs and warez servers. "
:)
:)
I have seen some REALLY good proxies that cache popular files from FTPs.
Ah, the legality 'issues' keep them from being too widespread though.
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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.
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
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...
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.