Ahh...Rene the Bomb Thrower:-)
I agree whole heartedly with the sentiment. In fact, we had a rather spirited
conversation at the Internet2 meeting over this topic. And fundamentally it
came down to the cost of provisioning the the campus connection(s) to the "rest"
of the Internet. ISP pricing is still expensive and the demand is high. So
some sort of "fair use" policies need to be institututed to allow the resources
to be shared. As long as budgets trail the network demand curve, I think we
will continue to see this defensive "circle the wagons" attitude among the
campus network management.
So, in order to solve this problem, we need to recognize that Internet access is
not free. And as long as campuses provide free access, they are in fact
subsidizing this sort of activity. Maybe that is a good thing, or at least is
consistent with the philosophical search for knowledge we espouse.
However, it does seem a bit hypocritical to bestow "legitimate" user status on
faculty or staff, and an implicit "illegimate" use status on dorm traffic. The
campus provides free internet access, what do you expect? This P2P traffic is
not illegal, but it has been demonized in general.
What would happen when the Web100 project gets really moving and starts
automatically tuning TCP stacks for high speed links? UltraFTP...even
legitimate users will be able to oversubscribe the link:-)
The astronomy faculty will hog the bandwidth when the distance learning folks
want to use it for video...or vice versa.
I find it interesting that this community as been looking and preparing
themselves for the Second Coming of the Killer App, and here it is. And we are
now trying to kill it, because it didn't look the way we expected it to look.
It arrived from the Internet1. It stepped on the toes of the music
distribution industry (and faculty trying to do legitimate work), it became
ubiquitous - in the dorms rather than labs.
I agree with Rene. We really need to put at least part of our efforts to
exploring ways to make bandwidth a non-issue. Just as Napster came out of left
field, it would be reasonable to expect the next application to come from
somewere unexpected as well...and nobody expects the dorms to do anything
useful.:-) We spend a lot of money and time simply trying to fill breaches in
the dike when what we need is a better way to channel the river. Look how much
money campuses spend on legacy voice services and infrastructure. We do need
policies to help manage the growth, but these should not be used (IMO) to
somehow identify the "good" applications and users from mere child's play.
Perhaps, such [illegitimate] over use of best effort networks will push campuses
to explore and more agressively deploy advanced technologies to manage these
resources such as usage based charging, QoS/CoS, line rate policy routing, etc.
Maybe even get involved with developing standardized architectures for efficient
peer-to-peer comunications protocols - using the napster class apps as impetus
and guinea pig. Making these applications run *better* might be more effective
than making them run slower. (This is not a diatribe against the campus
networkers, but an attempt to try to look at these issues differently...more to
encourage these applications and ways we can support them.)
Frankly, I think these P2P applications have a much larger role to play in the
discussion of legitimate IP rights of digital content. The genie is out of the
bottle. But thats another story...
Just some thoughts and comments...for what its worth.
Jerry "thrower of gasoline onto fires" Sobieski
301-346-1849 mobile
301-450-1886 MAX office
René Hatem wrote:
> I will preface by saying I do not work in a University and do not have to do
> deal with the operational problems many of you folks have to do deal with.
> But for the sake of discussion ...
>
> What happened to Universities carrying the flame of innovation? Why is
> there so much bellhead talk coming from the Universities support people
> (oversubscription, throttling, preventing servers, blocking ports, ...)?
> Is anyone trying to find mid to long term solutions that will **enable**
> students to do more of what they want - not less?
>
> How about GigE over fiber to every room in every dorm? Maximize use of
> Internet2 bandwidth. Provide what you can in terms of commodity Internet
> ...
>
> -rene
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 12:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [P2P] How much bandwidth is reasonable?
>
> > Joe St Sauver wrote:
> > >
> > > >Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 22:35:02 -0500
> > > >From: Joshua Wright <[log in to unmask]>
> > > >Subject: [P2P] How much bandwidth is reasonable?
> > > >
> > > >I have been tasked with coming up with a figure for planning purposes,
> > > >relating to how much bandwidth is reasonable per user in a residence
> > > >facility.
> > >
> > > Even modest levels can quickly aggregate to massive requirements, if you
> > > treat the requirements as hard guarantees and you don't oversubscribe...
> > >
> > > Assume even three thousand students...
> > >
> > > 256Kbps committment --> 768Mbps (OC12+)
> > > 56Kbps committment --> 168Mbps (OC3+)
> > >
> > > Or do the math backwards... if you are willing to provision a full
> 45Mbps
> > > DS3 for 3000 students, what kind of bandwidth would that work out to per
> > > student? ~15Kbps...
> >
> > Practically every net entity is oversubscribed on the premise that not
> > everyone will use it to capacity at the same time; some more
> conservatively
> > than others. The provisioning is more of an "acceptable packet loss"
> > without dropping connections due to serious degradation. If you want
> > to make money at it or get formal about it, go to the frame relay
> > model of committed and burst rates (to your subscribers, not ISP).
> >
> > As has been said before, bandwidth demand will increase to fulfill the
> > available supply, so at some point you must throttle.
> >
> > > >Understanding that reasonable is subjective, what are other people
> using for
> > > >design guidelines? In the simplest situation, is it reasonable for a
> single
> > > >student in a Residence Facility to have 64Kbps access? Then, toss in
> what
> > > >is acceptable oversubscription and subtract the small number of
> students
> > > >that do not come to campus with a computer.
> >
> > Most residents will be after Internet bandwidth. If you only have a
> > DS3 available, one user at 100Mbps can eat that up in theory (two DS3s
> > for that matter). Throw each residence in a 10Mb router port by that
> > philosophy.
> >
> > > Of course, the reality is that:
> > >
> > > -- ANY reasonable provisioning scheme would include substantial
> > > overcommitment (and the larger the number of users aggregated,
> > > the heavier the overcommitment can practically be)
> > >
> > > -- Your load is liable to asymetric (normal web browsing load will
> > > resulting in inbound load levels controlling your bandwidth
> > > requirements; an infestation of servers running from the
> > > residence halls can invert that condition)
> >
> > Egads, servers in dorms, externally addressable?
> >
> > > -- Your load will be highly time phased; a typical pattern for
> > > many residence hall networks is to be hot in the evening,
> > > a time when bandwidth requirements from campus offices and
> > > labs may be low (--> you may NOT want to provision separate
> > > capacity for your residence halls and your main campus, given
> > > that the load is time phased in a way that may be fortuitous).
> >
> > Agreed, and we use traffic-shaping with time-based access filters to
> > restrict the "filesharing hog du jour" during the day, and let them
> > fight it out after close of classes.
> >
> > > -- A tiny fraction of users are going to consume the greatest
> > > fraction of the bandwidth while most users will consume
> > > negligible amounts; a prudent strategy, then, is to focus on
> > > those who consume the most, and work one's way downward from
> > > there (of course, this implies per port flow data for the
> > > network)
> >
> > Quite true. We've considered asking for a "Bandwidth Hogs of the
> > Week" section in the student newspaper (an evil idea, admittedly),
> > but that could backfire.
> >
> > > -- You can substantially reduce bandwidth requirements by using
> > > passive web caching and NAT boxes (to effectively reduce or
> > > eliminate unathorized servers) -- but note that a loss of
> > > transparency is part of the price you'll pay for that bandwidth
> > > control
> >
> > We block only incoming connections to prevent servers.
> >
> > > -- Local congestion can really "help" you -- if you are worried
> > > about bandwidth, shared 10Mbps hubs will result in less traffic
> > > than switched 100Mbps infrastructure, for example.
> >
> > We started that way, but now most have 100Mbps switched (but only a
> > 100Mbps uplink). They get campus traffic really fast, but Internet
> > they compete with others (unless they fall into the Napster,etc rate
> > limit filter).
> >
> > > -- What you provision may be more determined by what your budget
> > > can underwrite than anything else, in the final analysis...
> >
> > We can't justify a "reserved" line for residence traffic without a
> > specific fee for access. Currently it is free, covered under a
> > blanket technology fee.
> >
> > Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
> >
|