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Friday, March 28, 2014

Throttling necessary in universities

At an unnamed English university:
"With the new installations, IT technicians have improved ability to monitor and tune the performance of wi-fi, and keep the network running at its best. The traffic on the wired and wireless student networks grew significantly in the year to January 2014 until, at the start of this term, demand at peak times reached the limits of the University's internet connection. This has been largely due to the changing nature of internet use, including a big increase in the amount of higher definition video being streamed to computers on the campus.
The growing popularity of cloud services has also had an impact as more devices are constantly using the internet to keep in sync.
All universities are facing similar issues and, to meet demand, Janet - the network provider to UK higher education - is rolling out a major new infrastructure across the country. As a temporary measure until the new service is in place, IT Services have had to reduce the capacity available to individual connections. This is to ensure that all students can use the internet for general web browsing and watch online video in reasonable quality. Without these limits, performance would have been quite uneven, with some people unable to use any external web sites. However, IT staff have been monitoring traffic and adjusting the limits regularly to make them as generous as possible until the extra bandwidth is available."

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