Online Edition | Washington State University | Pullman, Washington | Friday, October 19, 2001

Information Technology
Slogged-down Internet 
returns to hyperspeed
By Robert Frank, WSU Today

If your university Internet access seems like it’s traveling at the speed of a 1960 Rambler Ambassador without overdrive, take heart and have patience. Information Technology is energizing your access and moving it back to warp speed.

The reason for today’s sluggish Internet access is simple. Students downloading videos and music clog the university’s bandwidth.

Computer jargon clarified
For those of you unfamiliar with technical computer jargon, here’s a quick tutorial. Bandwidth describes the size and speed of an organization’s Internet access. Computer people sometimes refer to it as the size of the "pipe" you are funneling your Internet activity through. If you have a big, fast pipe, you can pour a lot of Internet traffic through it. If your pipe is small, things tend to get plugged up.

Online downloading is when someone goes out on the Internet, connects to a Web site and has a file transferred or copied electronically onto his or her computer. One of the slowest downloading methods is referred to as "peer-to-peer."

A T-1 Internet connection is generally considered to be a fairly fast, large pipe. It’s the current standard of measurement for industrial-sized users.

Double trouble
A couple years ago, when Yahoo Magazine rated WSU as being one of the top 10 most wired universities in the nation, it had 14 T-1 connections. However, the Napster phenomenon hit, attracting young people to copy or download music via a "peer-to-peer" connection. They were drawn to downloading service sites by the thousands, and WSU’s bandwidth or pipe jammed to maximum levels.

In August IT doubled the size of the university’s bandwidth to a full DS-3 connection, the equivalent of 28 T-1 lines. To administrators’ dismay, however, the new pipeline was jammed to full capacity the minute it opened.

What happened? Students had moved from Napster to KaZaA and other file sharing applications allowing computer enthusiasts to download not only music, but also videos and videogames. The files’ size grew from large to gargantuan. Here are a few examples:

• MP3 version of the Metallica hit song "Nothing Else Matters," 5.7 megabytes;

• Compressed version of the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," 800 megabytes;

• Tomb Raider III, a popular video game, 203 megabytes; and

• An episode of "The Simpsons," 25 megabytes.

Large files may take hours to transfer or copy over the Internet. So, students often begin their downloads, then let them run while they go to class or to bed. Hence, every T-1 line is jammed to the max from the wee morning hours until late at night or, as they say, 24/7.

If you think this is a rare phenomenon, think again. IT has monitored activity on the university’s lines and determined that 55 percent of all university bandwidth is gobbled up by this type of downloading. (See related article below regarding nationwide college dilemma.)

In addition to slowing up the university’s Internet services, the cost of providing and monditoring huge, high-speed Internet bandwidth is sizeable. Exact quarterly figures for the new DS-3 system are still being calculated Doyle said, but will be into the hundreds of thousands.

Limiting bulky traffic
To reverse the trend and return speedy access to those attempting to carry out academic or business pursuits, the university has purchased a $24,000 piece of bandwidth management equipment that in essence will limit downloads of music, videos, videogames and other similar files from sites like KaZaA, Napster and Gnutella.

"This move is expected to increase the perceived responsiveness and effectiveness of the university’s network," said Mary Doyle, IT vice president.

The equipment will allow IT to identify ingoing and outgoing traffic on the network by type and classify it. There are a multitude of categories, including videoconferencing, e-mail, Web site viewing, on-campus file sharing and various types of downloading.

"You might think of our bandwidth like a highway network with a bunch of different types of lanes," said Lynn Cannon, IT assistant director. "Once we categorize activities, we can treat them differently. ‘Trucks’ (music and video files), so to speak, go in the slow lane. Priority activities—similar to ‘carpoolers’—go in the faster lanes."

The new bandwidth management equipment was turned on Oct. 10 and has already begun to make a substantial improvement, renewing speed to priority activities. In essence, students wishing to download large files on peer-to-peer connections will simply be limited to a certain portion of the university’s bandwidth, which means downloads may go a bit slower.

"We still have thousands of these activities going on per day," Cannon said. "How we manage this and other types of traffic, such as university videoconferencing, will continue to be evaluated and changed on a continuous process based on demand."

What you can do
One of the things students, faculty and staff can do to improve Internet access, he said, is to take time to configure how they share files over the Internet. If they simply accept the default setting offered by some downloading services, they may have hundreds of people worldwide sharing the university’s bandwidth, via their computer.

"Sometimes we have detected as many as 2,500 computers accessing a single PC on the WSU network," Cannon said. "And more than 100 is not uncommon. Multiply that by 400 or more, and it really slows the system down."