UMW Network Bandwidth
The University's connection to the Internet, shared between both the Fredericksburg and Stafford campuses, is a DS3 44.736 Megabit-per-second connection (via Asynchronous Transfer Mode--ATM) from which some 10 Mbps are reserved for academic and administrative buildings and the remainder is available for use by the University's residence halls. Our connectivity for this purpose is provided by “Network Virginia” at a cost of more than $53,000 per year, paid from a combination of state funding and tuition revenues.
Student demand in the residence halls regularly exceeds our connection's capacity. The recent trend, to no one's surprise, is that the favorite Internet-based resources for students are increasingly those that consume the greatest chunks of "bandwidth," such as YouTube, other video-distribution sites, and graphically intense "virtual-world" sites. As a result, the growth in bandwidth consumption in the residence halls has been explosive.
While maintaining a healthy respect for budgetary realities, the costs of additional bandwidth and competing needs, we have attempt to increase our overall capacity as expeditiously as possible - recognizing the increased importance of Internet access in teaching, learning and scholarship as well as in the lives of our students.
Given the cost of increasing bandwidth, the University has managed bandwidth with the goal of providing relatively good service through short-duration bursts of traffic volume (that would exceed capacity if not managed). Unfortunately, major spikes in traffic are no longer of short-duration and without an increase in capacity, we can no longer meet the expectations of our students, faculty and staff with regards to access and use of Internet-based resources and services.
In support of the University’s mission and constituencies, we have an obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure that our users are using resources responsibly by managing the priority of uses (not users!) to support those activities most important to students, faculty and staff. Given the complexities inherent in bandwidth capacity management, at UMW we use "intelligent traffic shaping" to ensure that the uses that have been identified as important can continue during peak Internet-related-traffic periods. By long-standing policy, rankings of the importance of specific uses fall into three broad categories:
- Highest and Primary: To support the education, research, and administrative purposes of the University of Mary Washington.
- Medium and Secondary: To support other uses indirectly related to the University of Mary Washington's purposes with education or research benefits, including personal communications.
- Lowest and Least Important: Recreation and entertainment.
It is fair to say that peer-to-peer networking (P2P) has been associated much more with entertainment and other non-academic activity than academic activity, and it resides in the "lowest and least important" category, despite intense interest from students.
We also limit the use of some software "ports" at the "transport" layer of the network when they have been identified as known targets for attacks on networks. For obvious reasons, we will not offer detailed public information on these security-related configurations.
Finally, we don't allow some services at the "application layer" of the network (often only in specific circumstances) when they represent known security vulnerabilities. For example, we have disabled the capacity of many so-called POP e-mail services to interact with UMW servers, because the POP services usually transmit passwords over the network in accessible, unencrypted form. University users may still use un-encrypted POP with external servers if they wish to take that risk, but we only enable secure POP (encrypted) for use with University servers. And we have disabled SMTP (a common Internet standard for e-mail transmission) from computers in the student residence halls because of the frequency with which that protocol is used in generating spam addressed throughout the Internet from virus-infected or otherwise compromised computers.
With the rapid growth of usage the University has experienced in recent years, it is clear that our existing bandwidth capacity is inadequate relative to the current and potential future needs of our students, faculty and staff.
In response, the University has been working on several strategies that would serve to increase our overall connection capacity to the Internet and we had hoped to have this important work completed in advance of the start of the Fall 2008 semester. As it stands, we are in the final stages of installation and cutover to a new primary connection to the Internet.
Once completed, overall capacity will increase five-fold as we move to a 230 Megabit-per-second connection (current capacity is approximately 45Mps). Information Technology networking staff are working closely with our new vendors to complete the cutover as quickly as possible and it is anticipated that the improvements will be in place within a few weeks.
Over the summer, the University also signed a contract with Apogee Interactive Inc. to provide high speed Internet access, telephone and cable television services to students who live on campus. Current plans call for the new services to be available beginning in the 2009 winter semester.
This semester, the University will be working with Apogee to install the new services. Through Apogee, each student will be provided with a 3 Megabit-per-second connection with options available for greater bandwidth of up to 20Mps. Also, students will have several options available to them for telephone and television services on a subscription basis.
The combination of these initiatives should serve to alleviate some of the bandwidth difficulties experienced generally by all and in particular, by students in the residence halls. In the interim, please be considerate of your colleagues and peers in your use of the Internet.