Re: Streaming Video and Internet Capacity

[Adam Forsyth <forsytad () LUTHER EDU>]

Last summer we doubled our internet capacity and changed our bandwidth
management.

Last year:
 -- 40Megs shared among 2500 students
 -- Bandwidth management via an Allot Netenforcer.  The rules were capping
student bandwidth at 1Meg each, and attempting to very severely limit all
P2P to take up no more than 100K of the total pipe.  Unfortunately encrypted
P2P was not being classified properly in a lot of cases (and our students
knew it and adapted their usage accordingly). I believe that was partially
responsible for everyone's connections seeming very slow most of the time.
I would spend time trying to figure out how to better tweak the rules, but
kept coming to the conclusion that 40Megs was not enough, and that I
couldn't come up with rules that would make it seem like enough.

This year:
-- 85Megs shared among 2500 students
-- Our bandwidth management is now done with a NetEqualizer.  NetEqualizer's
philosophy of bandwidth management couldd be summed up as "We don't care
what type of traffic the users are generating, but they all have to share
the bandwidth."  I no longer spend any time thinking about what type of
traffic should be allowed to use how much bandwidth, and our users now have
a much better experience using our internet connection.

I'm convinced that both the increase in bandwith and the NetEqualizer are
partially responsible for the good results that we've had.  Our 85Meg
connection is actually 3 smaller connections and we had an outage where the
biggest connection of the 3 went down.  That took us down to 40Megs until
the outage was over.  We could certainly tell that we had less available
bandwidth, and that performance was worse than when the full capacity
available, but I still thought that our service through the NetEqualizer
felt more responsive than what we had last year.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 7:27 AM, Wood, Anne (wood) <wood () juniata edu> wrote:

>   Good Morning,
>
> We are struggling with Internet bandwidth due mostly to the large increase
> in online videos and programming (YouTube, ESPN, Netflix, etc).  We are a
> small liberal arts school with approximately 1400 students who live mostly
> on campus.  We do shape the Internet pipe using a Packetshaper, but only at
> an application level (not per person, connection, or site).  We have been
> working with a 45 Mbps link since last March and are trying to figure out
> what other schools have done to deal with the increase in demand from
> residential students and if those changes are working.
>
> Thank you in advance for your help.
>
> Anne Wood
>
> Director of Campus Network and Security
>
> Juniata College
>
> Huntingdon, PA
>
> (814)641-5310