Your experience is common to many universities.
(exerpt from University of Missouri Case Study: Palisade Systems)
Bandwidth and Liability: Missouri's Napster Problem
Bandwidth. Like many large universities, the University of Missouri, a Big
12 school with nearly 24,000 students, has a severe bandwidth problem. Their
bandwidth has doubled each of the last 6 years in order to keep up with the
incredible popularity of the World Wide Web, but in the last year their
bandwidth needs have outpaced even this exponential growth. The reason?
Napster. The explosive growth of this bandwidth-hogging, file-sharing
application has meant having to address bandwidth costs that are spiraling
out of control; the U of M was forced to supplement the bandwidth paid for
by NSF funds with an additional 10 Mb/s paid for out of school funds: 10
Mb/s at $10,000 per month. They had always relied on an open-access policy,
allowing each dorm room 10 megabytes of access without imposing (or being
able to impose) any control over student access.
One student with a popular set of song files could eat the entire Internet
connection.
Under this system, one student with a popular set of song files could eat
the bandwidth of the entire Internet connection, and this has happened more
and more frequently. From 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. weekdays, the bandwidth usage
was not too heavy, but after 2 p.m., when students began to return from
class and fire up Napster, use became so heavy (bandwidth usage was often as
much as 50% Napster) that many more mission-critical academic tasks could
not be accomplished; one engineering professor who ran a video streaming
server could almost never obtain the necessary bandwidth.
PS U of Mo solved some of their problem by blocking uploads of Napster with
Palisade's Packethound reducing substantially their bandwidth requirements.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peer-to-Peer [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Shelley
Henderson
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2001 8:53 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [P2P] How much bandwidth is reasonable?
Just a quick response from somebody who IS working at a university: we
ARE looking at longterm solutions... but we don't have either the
solution or the funding for the solution in place yet. Meantime, our
students came back from Christmas vacation and dang near maxed out our
connection to the Internet. After I got vicious hunting down servers --
mostly of the napster/gnutella/bearshare variety -- usage was cut back
by about a third.
The students' desire to use P2P should not -- NOT -- overwhelm the
other legitimate uses of the Internet by other students, by faculty,
and by staff.
So if you can tell me how we could have known ahead of time that usage
would double -- DOUBLE -- when the kids came back from Christmas
vacation, and where we can come up with the money for those gigE
connections for each pillow, please don't lecture us about carrying
torches for intellectual freedom.
Shelley
USC ISD
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