Is AIM Really a Bandwidth Hog?

Crispen asks: "A mess of schools, especially K-12 schools in the US, have banned instant messaging, claiming that it is a huge bandwidth hog. Is it? If you block ports 4443 (images) and 5190 (file transfers), how much bandwidth does AIM really take?"

Comments

Not Bandwidth - Tracking and Filtering

[JLester]

As Manager of Technology for a school system, we made the decision to shut down all AIM ports because there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it. Local, state, and even federal programs require that we monitor and filter all Internet access by minors. After having some incidents with AIM (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI), we shut down all Internet-based instant messaging programs.

The bandwidth use is negligible .. especially in these days of cheap bandwidth for education (we have a full DS3 45Mbps for a 7500 student district). The liability of having Internet traffic that is basically untraceable without a sniffer is something we can't have.

Jason

Re:Port 5190

[jeaton]

Nonsense. You can change the port to almost whatever port you want. login.oscar.aol.com listens on 1600 different ports, all with the same service. Try one, like say, port 80. Watch your network with tcpdump. You won't see anything on port 5190, and AIM will work just fine.

This is too bad.

[Deanasc]

I don't think I could have graduated without AIM to shuttle files back and forth from home to school. Mind you this was from college to my apartment but still I think it's a valid point. AIM was on almost all the computers in the labs and study areas. It was easy to move large files back and forth. AIM also has the ability to limit who gets acces to my home machine. I could easily ensure no one but me could get or give files.

Now before you go on about emailing my files, my college had the myopic foresight to limit email to 5 megs per attachment. My senior thesis was over 19 megs and my thesis advisor couldn't figure out how to open it after I split the files into email sized pieces. Turns out he didn't have winzip but that's another story. Make a long story short, his computer didn't have AIM and I had to turn a hard copy in late.

Once AIM caught on we had files going in and out of the department all the time. Students began collaborating on AIM. This was a commuter college and students HATE collaborating. AIM takes some of the sting out of having to drive in at the one awkward time when everyone can meet.

I can understand schools wanting to control net access but there are better ways to go about doing it. How many naughty files slip through the filters anyway. Blocking AIM isn't going to stop a determined kid but it will chill an effective means of communication between students and the school.

At the rate some schools are going all those computers will turn into nothing more then a complicated Cable TV system attached to a word processor.

Re:This is too bad.

[LordLucless]

Um, if your looking for a protocol to transfer large files back and forth, theres one been around for quite a while. It's called "FTP".

It ain't hard to setup an FTP server at home, and most Universities (Colleges for the yanks) allow FTP access to their students.

Why not just use that?