The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Providing and Paying for Bandwidth

Thursday, November 1, at 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern time

How can colleges keep up with the growing demand for bandwidth? Are colleges paying too much for bandwidth expenses?

Many colleges report paying more and more to keep up with campus demand for bandwidth. And many campus computing administrators are increasingly frustrated, feeling that it may be impossible to ever meet the demand. Some campuses are trying to add yet more bandwidth, while others are focusing on ways to control usage patterns so that certain technology needs (research and education) take priority over others (file-sharing so students can listen to music).

» Colleges Turn to Bandwidth 'Shapers' to Throttle Needless Use (10/24/2001)

» Penn's Bandwidth Impresses Some and Frustrates Others (10/25/2001)

Mark Berman is director of networks and systems at Williams College, where he has been employed since 1991. He has worked with data networks, computer systems, and telecommunications for more than 20 years. Before moving to Williams, he was a consulting specialist at Digital Equipment Corporation. Ken Orgill is chief information officer at West Virginia University, where he developed the university's first strategic plan for information technology. Previously, he worked on technology issues for IBM and Hughes Aircraft. Mr. Berman and Mr. Orgill will respond to questions and comments about bandwidth issues on Thursday, November 1, at 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Florence Olsen (Moderator):
Good afternoon, and thanks for joining today's online chat about bandwidth, a very current topic of conversation on campuses. Some of you may have taken part in the roundtable session this week at Educause 2001, where the topic was bandwidth management. I'm Florence Olsen, a reporter for The Chronicle, and I'll be the moderator for the chat. Some people wonder whether managing bandwidth may be an unmanageable problem for many institutions, and if so, why?

Question from Florence Olsen:
Mark Berman, would you tell us how big a problem bandwidth management really is?

Mark Berman:
Bandwidth management is not so much a problem as it is a requirement. Peer to peer file exchange applications in use today can consume more bandwidth than any institution can afford to provide. Priority has to be given to critical applications such as e-mail, telnet, or streaming media and bandwidth management is the way to do it.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Is it premature to conclude that most educational programs aimed at making students good network citizens are a waste of time?

Ken Orgill:
A single education program in and of itself might not seem effective. However, what's required is a multi-pronged effort where the user is constantly educated from a variety of sources as to appropriate network behaviors. Look how persistent we have had to be in educating users regarding opening attachments of unknown origin.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Are instant messaging and Internet Relay Chat consuming a fair amount of bandwidth -- and would you consider using bandwidth management tools to "block" these types of applications on your campus?

Mark Berman:
IM and IRC do not consume huge amounts of bandwidth if used just for text chatting, but both applications can be used to transfer files. Files that might be gigabit sized full length movies! Here at Williams we allow those applications but give them a low priority with our bandwidth shaper.

Question from Michael Arnone, education reporter, Chronicle:
Can a college have too much bandwidth? What are the costs of having unused bandwidth?

Ken Orgill:
An institution can never have too much bandwidth. Generally speaking our experience is that whatever bandwidth you give them will be used (within reason). Keep in mind that Internet traffic is "bursty" and that you'll need to provide a big enough pipe to allow for peak traffic. Using tools that monitor your bandwidth utilization can help you decide when to add more bandwidth and takes away some of the guessing so that huge amounts of bandwidth does not go unused.

Question from Todd Watson, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas:
Most of the increase in Internet bandwidth use on campuses is due to illegal file-sharing of copyrighted materials. One technical solution might be to do file-sharing on the local network by running a local OpenNAP, or similar server. Does the legality of running such service differ from providing Internet connectivity to the students? Both services provide students with a means for breaking the law -- as well as for legitimately sharing other multimedia materials.

Mark Berman:
I'm not a lawyer so I'd have to demur on answering the legan part of this question. I *would* say that that students will share files with each other regardless of whether there is an institutionally provided means of doing so. Many schools, including ours, already provide fileserver based storage which students can use, if they choose, to share files with each other. I do think that we need to expect students to use college resources legally. Marge Hodges Shaw has said that just because something is possible doesn't mean it's all right. Guns are legal in this country be we still expect people to not kill each other!

Question from Florence Olsen:
How common is the practice of preserving bandwidth for administrative and academic uses by isolating dormitory traffic, and how is that done?

Ken Orgill:
Some time ago we installed a tool called QOS (from Lightspeed) which allows us to allocate and control bandwidth to various areas of campus. An analysis of dorm usage (3800 residents) revealed potential impact to administrative and academic users during business hours. Consequently we decided to limit bandwidth to the residence halls during certain hours. As much as we would like to provide unlimited bandwidth 24/7 we simply can't afford it. The appetite for bandwidth in the dorms appears to be insatiable. During unregulated hours our DS3 to the Internet runs at 100% utilization.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Is bandwidth, or network capacity, used as a selling point to attract students to your campus?

Mark Berman:
Not specifically but I do think it's something that many students look at.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Viruses are a big source of bandwidth headaches. Why are some colleges reluctant to tackle the virus problem on their campus networks by pushing anti-virus software out to all computers on the network, even student-owned computers?

Ken Orgill:
WVU has a anti-virus policy at both the server and client level. In addition to strong anti-viral protection on our servers we recommend that all users, including students install anti-viral software on their machines and keep it updated. We do push the software out to some, mainly administrative machines, but students in particular are choosy about which anti-viral package they want to use and hence we hesitate to push it out to them.

Florence Olsen (Moderator):
If you have questions for Ken Orgill and Mark Berman, now would be a good time to ask them because we're halfway into our conversation about bandwidth.

Question from Bill Weeks, Ithaca College:
We will be obtaining PacketShaper from Packeteer in the very near future. I would like to hear from other educational institutions that use this product to learn what policy measures they have invoked.

Mark Berman:
That's a little complicated to answer here. I'd suggest that you join an e-mail list for Packeteer users (I'm sure there is one, check with Packeteer). Whatever you learn about what other people are doing, be sure to analyze your own traffic patterns to make sure that it fits what your own users are doing. Every school will probably find its needs a little different. Use tools like Snort or Flowscan to find out what applications are being used on your Internet link and to get some idea of what they're being used for. You don't want to hurt legitimate traffic.

Question from Dave Opitz, Loyola College in Maryland:
I think colleges can get enough bandwidth for the faculty and administrators, but the students suck up all the bandwidth we give them doing file sharing (Napster/ Gnutella-like applications). I've heard of several possible solutions to this issue, running from not permitting file sharing, to survival of the fittest, and several things in between. What do you recommend?

Ken Orgill:
Our answer to this problem is to somewhat limit bandwidth to the residence halls during business hours (7am to 7pm) but to open the pipe up at all other times. Rather than trying to prohibit file sharing, etc. if the bandwidth is fully utilized (outside of business hours) then the natural consequence of abuse is a slower system. Quite frankly, we don't get very many complaints by the student's that the system is "unusably" slow.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Do you know of any situations where colleges have been able to cut their bandwidth costs through some form of cooperative buying with another or several other institutions?

Mark Berman:
Well we've done that at Williams as part of a county-wide initiative to bring low-cost high-quality networking into a rural area. I know that other institutions that are located near each other have done collective purchasing to reduce costs. I can think of at least two examples, one here in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. It's a very good idea if you can find like minded institutions or businesses to partner with.

Question from Jim Donahue, King College:
Have any of you come up with innovative ways to provide funding for additional bandwidth? Our budgets are fairly modest and rarely see increases.

Ken Orgill:
We have the same problem, budget wise. As I've previously mentioned, rather than keep piling on bandwidth to the students that gets immediately utilized, we've chosen to provide a fairly large pipe (DS3)and monitor the traffic. We've talked some about charging residence hall students a modest fee for connectivity. We are also working with other local enterprises (such as a National Energy Lab that we have here in town) to share bandwidth expense and employ economies of scale.

Question from Michael Arnone, education reporter, Chronicle:
How much do you spend per megabit on bandwidth? Is this more or less the same as you have spent in the past several years?

Mark Berman:
There is a confidentiality issue in telling you exactly what we're paying, but I can say that it significantly less per megabit than we were paying a year and a half ago. Prices have been coming down and I think will continue to do so. There's a large up-front cost in building national backbone networks, but once they're installed the marginal costs of operation are not so high. This is what made the telephone companies so rich. Of course Bell Telephone had government support in building the national phone network. :)

Question from Bob Paver, Southwestern Univ:
Are any of you using quotas, a la disk quotas? In the old days, disk was a scarce resource and one had to at least ask for more space, even if it was free. Measuring and monitoring are non-trivial but perhaps achievable.

Ken Orgill:
No quotas when it comes to bandwidth, at WVU. We do have "quotas" when it comes to disk utilization on our student email system.

Question from Florence Olsen:
How does your institution deal with Napster and other file-sharing services?

Mark Berman:
We use a bandwidth shaper, in our case the NetEnforcer from Allot Communications, to prioritize traffic. By doing that we can allow the use of any of these file sharing applications while ensuring that high-priority traffic such as web access and e-mail get what bandwidth they need. You have to remember that there ARE legal uses for peer to peer file sharing applications, even if they don't seem to be common.

Question from Carlos Diaz-Silveira, U of Miami:
Could you name a *few* vendors that are currently shipping bandwidth-limiting tools for gigabit-Ethernet links?

Ken Orgill:
I'm not aware of specific companies offering QOS solutions for Gigabit-Ethernet in terms of bandwidth limitation. However, companies such as Lightstream, Cisco, etc. would be good candidates to approach.

Question from Tim Alexander, Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of PA:
We all recognize the cause of colleges' geometrically growing bandwidth needs is the recreational use of Internet bandwidth. Why are colleges so reluctant to establish and enforce a code of conduct in which such non-educational use of college resources is prohibited -- or is offered on an a la carte basis like many other campus amenities?

Mark Berman:
Well first of all recreational use is not the only reason that bandwidth usage is growing dramatically. e-mail alone has grown hugely in its use of bandwidth over the last few years. The use of attachments accounts for much of that. In terms of recreational use we have to remember that students are not only our students they are also our tenants. They live their lives in our dorm rooms, and not just the academic part of their lives. They expect the same kinds of internet services that they'd get from an ISP. And I think we do need to provide that.

Question from Ed Fuller, Ithaca College:
Our experience has been that opening the pipe up after hours as Ken suggested has the effect of slowing response from the outside to inquiries to our servers, such as the Web server used for recruitment. How would you address this?

Ken Orgill:
Depending on the size of your pipe this could be true. We have found that most of the bandwidth is "outgoing" when we open the pipe, therefore it's impact to campus web servers is minimal.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Should universities be signing multiyear contracts for commercial Internet bandwidth in today's environment?

Mark Berman:
Prices are very volatile both for Internet bandwidth and for Long Distance telephone service. I think two years is probably a reasonable time frame for a good contract: long enough to get the best pricing, but not so long that you're likely to get burnt by prices falling below your contract price.

Question from Florence Olsen:
One aspect of the bandwidth problem that we haven't talked much about is "uptime." How reliable is your campus network, for example? Is it always up? Almost always? And a related question, how reliable is your Internet connection?

Ken Orgill:
West Virginia University's backbone network was originally designed to provide a high level of redundancy and reliability. As a result we have experienced a total of six hours downtime over the last six years. This is exceptional reliability and something our network folks are very proud of. As far as our Internet connectivity, we don't always control our own destiny. Our Internet provider has had occasional problems resulting in downtime. This downtime, however, has been limited and we have in the neighborhood of 95% uptime.

Question from Irene Upshur, Marymount University:
Aren't university consortial agreements with bandwidth providers the only viable way for institutions to have access to all the bandwidth needed for streaming video/audio, 3D animation, etc? Assuming terabytes of bandwidth exist at a university, do you know of any access initiatives that have been tried to make low cost, high-end computers available for student home reception?

Ken Orgill:
At WVU we are pursuing partnerships with bandwidth providers and see some promise in this approach. If I understand your question about "student home reception", we are currently researching how to provide wireless bandwidth to students off campus.

Question from Ed Fuller, Ithaca College:
So, Ken most of your bandwidth is outgoing? Does this imply that your students are serving up lots of multi-media stuff? I wonder if others find this to be true as well?

Ken Orgill:
You hit the nail on the head! That's the reality of it. My guess is that most student user populations fall in this realm.

Question from Florence Olsen:
Some of the ways to meet bandwidth demand involve spending more money -- at a time many colleges face increasing IT costs and tight budgets overall. How much spending on bandwidth issues is reasonable? Do you worry about IT budgets taking up too large a share of college budgets?

Ken Orgill:
The expense of bandwidth seems like a black hole. There's never enough. This expense is hard to assimilate since my bandwidth budget is relatively fixed and the cost is skyrocketing. Hence "reasonable" becomes more a function of how much I can afford. Many here at the university worry that IT costs are skyrocketing and consuming every larger portions of the overall university budget. The truth is that IT budgets at universities and colleges are generally underfunded.

Question from Florence Olsen:
What kind of -- if any -- chargeback arrangements have you put in place to pay for student bandwidth use on your campus?

Ken Orgill:
Currently we do not chargeback for network services to students, including Internet connectivity. We have a student technology fee but this does not pay for bandwidth.

Florence Olsen (Moderator):
And that will have to be the final word on bandwidth, because I see that we're at the end of our hour. This has been an enjoyable chat, with lots of good questions and insightful answers from our expert guests, Ken Orgill, from West Virginia University, and Mark Berman, from Williams College. Thank you for the conversation.

Mark Berman:
This has been very interesting and I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate. It seems like most of us are dealing with similar problems in terms of bandwidth usage and management. By talking to each other we can both share solutions, and share the pain by commiserating! I encourage everyone to joing e-mail discussion groups such as those run by Educause. Thank you.

Ken Orgill:
Thanks for the opportunity folks to share a little of the insight and experiences from West Virginia University. Bandwidth is a hot topic, and not likely to go away soon!