Bandwidth!

How the Residential Network is handling it.

What is “BANDWIDTH” and why is it important?

Bandwidth refers to the amount of information that can flow up and down the network. The more bandwidth used, the larger the cost. (Just think of it as a long distance call, or electricity!) Most residents use very little bandwidth as they browse the web, send e-mail and download an occasional file.  In the past, about 2% of the residents would use over 90% of the available bandwidth causing slowdowns and poor performance for everyone.

 

How much “Bandwidth” does the housing network have?

At the present time, we have over 200 mbs connection from the Residential Network to the UCI network. 

 

Is our bandwidth managed now?

Yes.  During the summer of 2001 we installed a very sophisticated piece of equipment that monitors all network traffic to and from the Housing Network. We added a second PacketShaper in the Fall of 2002 to help balance the load. In 2005 we upgraded both packetshapers to a newer version to meet out ever increasing student population. We now can identify and prioritize network traffic to provide a fair and equitable amount of bandwidth for all residents.  This means that the resident who wants to download music or movies will be extremely limited so the bandwidth for all others is not degraded.  We now classify many of the over 60 “Peer-to-peer” applications such as Bit Torrent, Filetopia, DC++, iMesh, Gnutella, Kaaza, Morpheus, DirectConnect etc as entertainment traffic and it is given a much lower priority than web browsing, e-mail and transferring files to and from other UCI locations.

 

This also includes bandwidth available by folks OUTSIDE of UCI that try to upload Peer-to-peer files FROM computers in the residential network.  We found that over 50% of the network traffic leaving the housing network headed out the Internet was from one single file sharing application.  By limiting this type of traffic we can save the University (and YOU) literally thousands of dollars and increase the performance of the network for everyone.

 

How does this “PacketShaper “ control bandwidth?

We have identified and cataloged the different types of traffic that moves across the network; 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 UCI 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 UCI network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus. We say "virtually", as we found that several enterprising students discovered that they could set up a proxy server on the University side of the PacketShaper, and sent all P2P traffic that direction, knowing that it would be ignored. We finally caught on when we began experiencing decreased performance. We now severely limit all P2P traffic going towards any computer on the University side.
  2. All ssh and web traffic is given a high priority! Browsing the web is done by every resident, 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. During the summer of 2003, we will be adding two Web Cache Engines to our network that will increase the performance of web browsing (including streaming media), greatly.
  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, streaming audio or video, games (Starcraft, Counterstrike etc).  If the bandwidth is available, then there is no limit except for the total 200+ mbs. 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 for dos attacks, trojans, worms, virus', rogue spam servers, internal DC++ servers, etc..
  4. Peer to Peer (P2P) is given a lowest priority, and is limited to 10 mbs, if the bandwidth is available.  Therefore, of the 60 mbs total bandwidth, only 10 mbs is set aside for P2P. 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 in the past that P2P traffic (Bit Torrent, Morpheus, Kaaza, Filetopia, Napster, Gnutella, AudioGalaxy etc) consumed such quantities of bandwidth that the legitimate educational uses of not only the residential network, but also the total UCI network suffered.  Further, the demands on bandwidth were driving the costs for our Internet Service out of control.
  5. Worms!  The recent invasion of the CodeRed and Nimda worm infected many computers within the housing network.  We were able to set our PacketShaper to recognize several variants of these malicious WORMS and block some of them!

 

Does this mean that you can monitor the web sites I visit and read my e-mail?

NO! Absolutely not.  We are concerned with network performance and which applications are running on the network, not the content of what residents are moving, reading or which web sites are visited.  Your privacy is one of our prime concerns, as is guaranteeing a fair and equitable amount of bandwidth for each of our 6,700+ residents.

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.

 

More information on Bandwidth can be found on the following web sites.

The Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://www.chronicle.com/free/v48/i05/05a04401.htm

 

Packeteer:

http://www.packeteer.com/prod-sol/products/packetshaper.cfm