Penn State Intercom......November 29, 2001

Automated system to
manage University's bandwidth

While universities around the country debate how to best resolve concerns related to the excessive use of Internet bandwidth, Penn State is taking steps to provide its students, staff and faculty with an effective solution to the problem.

This fall, the University launched an automatic process that both monitors the amount of bandwidth used by residence hall students and issues warning notices to those who exceed weekly limits that have been established by the institution. The Office of Telecommunications, Office of Housing and Residential Life, Association of Residence Hall Students, and the Commonwealth Council of Student Government collaborated to plan the University's automated approach to the bandwidth issue.

The concerted effort came about in response to the discovery earlier in the year that a high percentage of the resource was being consumed by a very small number of students in the University's residence halls. Heavy downloads by individuals using software such as Napster and MP3.com were making it increasingly difficult for University users to access and effectively use the Internet to support their class work and research efforts, according to Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology.

"Uninterrupted network access is extremely critical for Penn State to carry out its mission today," Augustson said. "The need to ensure that this critical resource is available to support legitimate academic interests prompted the University's immediate response to the issue."

Although numerous other universities have elected to address bandwidth concerns by restricting student's access to Internet content (and in some cases banning specific Web sites altogether), the approach chosen by Penn State has been to manage the bandwidth the University purchases, ensuring that predetermined allocations are not exceeded.

The new system, activated at the beginning of fall semester, was recently updated in early November.

Implementation team members observe that the plan appears to be working well. Each student's residence hall network connection is afforded a weekly allocation of 1.5 GBytes of outbound network information transfer. The amount used is electronically measured, and students who are found to exceed their individual weekly allocations are subject to automatically issued warnings along with the eventual reduction of their connection speeds. Any individuals who continue to exceed acceptable levels after receiving three separate warning letters, will have their network privileges suspended. Statistics are generated weekly and distributed to University administrators involved in the monitoring process.

The University's plan makes it possible for students to still freely access the Web sites that interest them, commented Augustson, but simultaneously it prevents a small number of individuals from consuming most of the resource.

"For Penn State, the difficulty of addressing this issue was amplified by having more than 15,000 active residence hall network connections -- far more than most other universities," he said. "Given this number, an automated approach was essential."

To assure that bandwidth is available to meet the University's needs, beyond those associated with the residence halls, the University has limited the total amount of bandwidth available to residence hall networks. A priority has also been established that provides bandwidth for general University needs over residence hall use, should the University's connection to the Internet reach maximum capacity. As additional needs for bandwidth arise and new services are provided requiring larger amounts, adjustments will be made to this approach ensuring that both overall and individual needs continue to be met.

For information on the bandwidth initiative, check the Residential Computing page at http://www.rescom.psu.edu/ on the Web.

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