Bandwidth! How Information Technology is handling it.

What is “BANDWIDTH” and why is it important?
Simply put, bandwidth is the carrying capacity of a network. It's similar to a highway. Three lane highways can carry more traffic than two. However, neither can carry an infinite amount of traffic. At a certain level, even a six lane highway can become saturated.  Speed and performance on a network or highway is inversely proportional to the amount of traffic carried, i.e., more traffic, slower speeds.

Most users use very little bandwidth as they browse the web, send e-mail and download an occasional file.  However in the past, about 2% of the users would use over 90% of the available bandwidth causing slowdowns and poor performance for everyone.  The more bandwidth any one person uses, the less there is available for the rest of the user population.

How much bandwidth does the SAU network have?
At the present time, we have a 9 mbps connection from St. Ambrose University to our ISP (equivalent to 6 T-1’s).

Is our bandwidth managed?
Yes.  During the summer of 2001 we installed equipment that monitors all network traffic to and from the network. We now can identify and prioritize network traffic to provide a fair and equitable amount of bandwidth for all users.

Quality of Service (QoS)
Quality of service is a networking term that specifies a guaranteed throughput level.  We are currently trying to establish QoS rates that will guarantee the best throughput.

In reality, 9mbps is a lot of bandwidth.  However, this must serve faculty, staff, students, computer labs, web servers, incoming/outgoing email, and online classes.  If 100% of this traffic was educational the network would be very fast. But we also realize that 900+ students call the SAU campus home and do not have the opportunity to use an alternate ISP, so we allow this traffic across our network.

How does Information Technology control bandwidth?
This is where things get a bit tricky.  Applications are released faster than updates for our equipment, so we have added a QoS policy and rolled the two together.

We have identified and cataloged the different types of traffic that moves across the network and set priorities for the different types and where the traffic goes to or originates from. Here’s a short list:

1. Virtually all network traffic to/from any SAU computer, web site or server is untouched.  There are no controls and no need to shape this, as it is “educational” traffic.  Furthermore, as it does not go to or from the Internet, we don’t have to pay for it.  As long as it stays within the SAU network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus.

2. All web traffic is given a high priority!  Browsing the web is done by everyone, and nothing is as frustrating as waiting for a web page to load.  Recognizing this, we give web traffic a special designation allowing it to have priority over other applications.

3.  All other regular traffic bound for or to the Internet (not counting peer-to-peer), is given the next priority, such as ftp, telnet, instant messaging, streaming audio or video, games, etc.  If the bandwidth is available, then there is no limit except for the 9 mbps. This policy allows everyone a “fair and equitable” amount of bandwidth.  So far, we have not seen any problems with this type of bandwidth shaping, except the times that the network comes under attack from trojans, worms, viruses, etc.

4.  Peer to Peer (P2P) is given a lowest priority, if the bandwidth is available.  We realize that this means extremely slow downloads and problems connecting with other peers; however, the P2P traffic is not “educational” by its very nature.  P2P is an incredible consumer of bandwidth, and no matter how much we set aside, it would never be enough.  We found that P2P traffic (Bit Torrent, Morpheus, Kazaa, Filetopia, Napster, Gnutella, AudioGalaxy etc) consumed such quantities of bandwidth that the legitimate educational uses of the entire SAU network suffered.

We are concerned with network performance, not the content of what users are moving, reading or which web sites are visited (unless it violates our AUP).  Your privacy is one of our concerns, as is guaranteeing a fair and equitable amount of bandwidth for each of our users.

Please remember that we strive to maintain a fair and equitable use of bandwidth policy.  Further, we work daily to keep our network tuned up and performing at peak!  We continually monitor performance, update hardware and software, and analyze network traffic to make sure no single program that is non-educational in nature interferes with your legitimate educational use of our network.

Read more about Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications

How can I help improve the speeds of the SAU network?
Use recreational applications at night
Network utilization is lowest between 9pm and 7am daily

Turn off file sharing in P2P applications
P2P applications have an option that allows other users to download files from your computer.  An inbound connection from the Internet to your computer takes speed away from you!!  Sharing files from your computer to other P2P users reduces your Internet speeds.

Adapted from:
University of California - Irvine
Stanford University
University of Maryland
Western Washington University