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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?"
amazing, just amazing... of course if it was the RIAA or MPAA asking for who sent xyz avi or mp3 aol would bend over backwards to provide data, no doubt.
Without file transfers IM doesn't take much bandwidth. Think about it, messages of of a few dozen bytes only take 1 packet to send! No, you'd have to have hundreds of IMs to add up to a few piddly Kbps. Problem is allowing IM and diallowing file transfers. Or, as one poster stated, monitoring IM traffic. In that case, they could run their own jabberd server, and with firewall rules force users to use it. Since it's GPL/OS they should be able to modify the code to allow "snooping", if jabberd doesn't already.
If you want my advice, set up an IRC server and teach people how to use it. It should be exceedingly easy for you to track all of it's usage. True it might not exactly facilitate people communicating to/from off-campus but it would solve your accountability problem. You could even use Trillian as the client, thus giving people that "IM feel".
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Sure lets block email too! Email costs productivity!
I used IM and EMail regularly throughout the day to communicate with my teachers and fellow students. My productivity would take a big dump without either technology. If I lost both, well fuck I might have to use a telephone! Hey everybody lets ban all forms of communication other than written mail! Wake up.
Using AIM during a lecture is a totally different problem and shouldn't require BANNING it from the lab. IMNSHO it's no different from using a CELL PHONE during a lecture and the teacher should deal with the problem accordingly. And if it's a lab where people are typing anyway and the teacher can't tell that the student is IMing then who cares? Students aren't robots and you can't FORCE them to learn no matter how hard you try. If they can IM in lab and still pass then more power to 'em. If they fail then too damn bad, it's their own damn fault.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Who said thier limitation was technological?
If they don't have the staff to monitor instant messages then it is impossable for them.
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