Bandwidth Management

Using open source software to build a traffic management system gave our campus network neutrality, low costs, and low maintenance for managing bandwidth.

What are you doing to meet the exponential growth of network traffic? Are you moving from gigabit to 10-gigabit capacity on the backbone? Are you successfully increasing capacity to university and public education endpoints to gigabit or greater? Is your approach to increase capacity with network-owned fiber or to contract with telcos, or a combination of both? Panelists will share their experiences with and ideas about how a state education network can meet the growing bandwidth demands of their customers.

"As foreshadowed at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, federal regulators this week took the first formal step into investigating complaints about how Internet service providers, such as Comcast, manage peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their networks "

"If you were responsible for a college's network and were faced with infringement notices from the recording and motion picture industries, how would you handle them? That's the question Elliot Kendall, network security architect at Brandeis University, faced. He decided to ask his peers how they handled P2P traffic on campus networks, as well as DMCA takedown notices and prelitigation settlement letters."

Since its inception in 1997, this group has discussed a wide range of topics relevant to network managers including network convergence, bandwidth management, management systems, security, wireless technologies, and support. This gathering will allow network managers to share ideas about their current professional challenges and new or emerging technologies with other networking experts from a wide variety of institutional backgrounds.

New technologies and infrastructure that extend bandwidth and power to the seafloor are being developed within the Ocean Observatories Initiative of the National Science Foundation. A major component of this effort involving construction of major cabled subsea networks is focusing on science and education programs that will make use of this unprecedented interactive access to study the northeast Pacific Ocean. The last frontier on Earth—the deep sea—will be accessible to a global community of scientists, educators, decision makers, and learners of all ages. New technologies will enable new approaches to studies of ocean and earth processes that, for example, regulate global climate, absorb greenhouse gases, generate earthquakes and tsunamis, support major fish stocks, harbor life in the extreme environments of sea floor volcanoes, and form vast mineral resources.

"According to an Oct. 19 article by the Associated Press, Comcast has been actively degrading and
blocking BitTorrent traffic, amounting to "the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S.
Internet service provider." This is the latest and most clear cut incident illustrating the need for "network
neutrality" principles for the Internet. This factsheet provides a technological backgrounder on what
Comcast is blocking and how the company does it."

The authors discuss why the FCC auction of a large block of spectrum is important to colleges and universities.

This document is a reply to a comment filed by NBC Universal requesting that the FCC require that broadband providers “use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband networks to transfer pirated content.” EDUCAUSE signed the document along with 10 other public interest organizations to express their concern for this inappropriate and misguided use of available bandwidth management tools.

"How much longer can colleges and universities continue to rely on packet-shaping as the fundamental way of dealing with bandwidth-intensive applications? From a purely technical point of view, the answer is, of course: Indefinitely...."