The Chronicle: 9/28/2001: Napster Was Nothing Compared With This Year's Bandwidth Problems

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Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Matthew Bailey, a senior analyst for Webnoize, about how students' increasing use of file-sharing services is clogging campus computer networks, on Thursday, September 27, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

Amid his clothes and the trappings for his dorm room, he hauled in a brand new computer -- a high-school-graduation gift from his parents. And while a puny modem connection kept him from being much of a Napster fiend at home, he saw great promise in the university's fat Internet pipe.

"I thought I was going to have a really fast connection," Mr. Conklin says, walking through campus one evening with Melissa Pittman, a friend from his dormitory.

"Yeah," Ms. Pittman chimes in, "all the upperclassmen on our floor said we were going to get spoiled."

Alas, too many freshmen must have heard older students singing the network's praises. During the first couple of weeks of class, the university's residential networks have been so swamped with entertainment downloads -- not just music, but also hefty video files -- that Mr. Conklin and Ms. Pittman sometimes have had trouble opening a simple Web page.

The problem isn't unique to the University of Delaware. Institutions as diverse as Salem State College, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the University of Denver had tremendous surges in bandwidth use after students arrived -- loads far beyond what those institutions used last spring.

"A lot of it is attachments to e-mails that have gone up logarithmically in size, where people are e-mailing music and videos to each other," says Ken Stafford, the vice-chancellor for technology at the University of Denver. Over the summer, the university doubled its bandwidth capacity. "We'll probably look at going up by another 50 percent or 100 percent by next year," Mr. Stafford adds. The traffic went down recently when the university staff installed a bandwidth shaper, which can be programmed to limit entertainment downloads.

Getting Swamped

Justin D. Sipher, the director of computing and technology services at the State University of New York at Potsdam, says that his institution has also doubled its capacity since last year and is already swamped by downloads. To respond to the traffic, the university will double its bandwidth within a month.

College administrators say this year's freshmen arrived already knowing where to find various file-sharing applications and how to use them. Officials at Delaware and elsewhere say that it will take more than educational programs and students' goodwill to solve the problem. Although Delaware has in the past advocated an educational approach to bandwidth management, university officials were forced to begin limiting downloads earlier this month.

In this new round of bandwidth battles, Napster is a distant memory. Network managers find the students flocking to a host of copycat peer-to-peer file-sharing services, including Audiogalaxy, BearShare, and Morpheus. The services, known by the shorthand "P2P," let users download files directly from other users' computers. The most popular new service might be KaZaA, through which it's as easy to download a Stanley Kubrick film as a Seinfeld episode, a Metallica song, an image, or a document. Much of what KaZaA users make available online is pornography.

The sizes of the files students want can vary. Images are often quite small, usually anywhere from 50 to 200 kilobytes, depending on the size and quality of the picture. Music files are many times larger, about four megabytes each.

But video files and software can be far larger still. Versions of Quake III, a popular video game, can run anywhere from 120 to 160 megabytes. A full-length movie with good resolution can run from 350 to 800 megabytes. (Full-length films available through file-sharing services are often split into more than one part, so that users can watch them in segments.) As was the case with Napster, in most instances these downloads of images, videos, music, and software circumvent any copyright restrictions.

A Rage for Video

Video seems to be a new rage among file-sharing students. "The new systems are much better than Napster ever was -- you can download not only video, but also software," says Matthew Bailey, a senior analyst for Webnoize, a company that analyzes and reports on the Internet entertainment industry.

Mr. Bailey says that his company tracks the average size of files downloaded through "one of the leading P2P networks," and has found that the transfers are growing rapidly.

At the start of August, the average file size was 4.8 megabytes, not much bigger than an MP3 file. "That shows that the majority of files being shared were music files," Mr. Bailey says. But he adds, "The mix is definitely changing." By the end of August, the average file size had increased to 5.2 megabytes. His guess is that more and more of the files transferred contain video and software.

Mr. Bailey says that new compression technologies are always improving, allowing users to make music files ever smaller without significantly sacrificing sound quality. But video files are more difficult to compress. "Video sizes won't get smaller," he says. "If anything, they're going to get bigger."

More Trouble Ahead

And that spells trouble, as network managers at Delaware realized earlier this month. Although university officials don't examine the content of downloads, they are sure the rising popularity of video is a factor.

"We have problems with certain students downloading 19 gigabytes of stuff," Susan J. Foster, the university's vice president for information technologies, says with some exasperation. "What is a student doing to download 19 gigabytes? What is that -- the entire Library of Congress? It makes us think that it's video."

It's certainly no mystery to Mr. Conklin and Ms. Pittman, the Delaware freshmen. One student on their floor regularly downloads episodes of sci-fi cartoons. He recently used the network to download a video game, says Ms. Pittman. "It took all day to download -- it was a huge file."

While some universities imposed broad network limits during the Napster craze last year, Delaware stuck to a simple policy of educating students about good network citizenship. Under the policy, students are required to pass a test with questions about network ethics and copyright issues before getting network access. The university dealt with egregious bandwidth busters by shutting off their Internet access and lecturing them about the rules of network use.

The educational programs will remain, Ms. Foster says, but the university will add a downloading limit of one gigabyte per student per day. But that's still plenty of data. Betsy Mackenzie, director of the university's help center, says students could still download hundreds of songs, thousands of images, or a large video file without breaking the bank.

"We want to provide them the capability if their classes require them to do that," Ms. Mackenzie says. "But we certainly don't want them to download a movie."

"That's not what it's for," Ms. Foster adds.

When students go above the limit, their names will go on a list, and university officials will talk to the students about the one-gigabyte policy and explain that their Internet service will be suspended if they don't curb their habits.

Already, Ms. Mackenzie says, about 100 students have showed up on the list. Many of them don't realize they are helping to clog the network, she says.

New Patterns

The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has seen tremendous network-usage increases this year as well. Last spring, the university installed a new Internet pipe just for the dormitories; it ran at 85 percent of capacity until the end of the school year. "They came back this year and pretty much pegged it at 100 percent right off the bat," says Dewitt Latimer, the director of information-technology infrastructure for the university system. "As we delve down into it, we're finding different kinds of patterns, different addresses that they are going to. It's not the standard Napster and MP3 downloads anymore."

During the middle of the first week of September, Mr. Latimer says, downloads by KaZaA users alone constituted more than 50 percent of the traffic on the residential networks; students were using other peer-to-peer services as well, such as Gnutella. And KaZaA users outside of the university were gumming up traffic, too. About 75 percent of outgoing traffic involved KaZaA users downloading material from students' computers.

For the time being, Mr. Latimer says, the university is considering educational programs and peer pressure as its response. "We've talked with student leadership about posting a top-50-users page, so they can police themselves. If someone consistently turns up at the top, chances are he'll get some evil stares from his fellow residents."

A Free Service

One reason bandwidth use is so hard to control is that, from the campus user's perspective, it is just about free. At Tennessee, unlimited Internet access in the dormitories is paid for out of the general operating fund. Mr. Latimer says he tried to persuade administrators to increase fees for those who live in the dorms to cover the cost of the additional bandwidth, but he was blocked by the campus-services office.

"The folks that head up local campus services are very strong politically," Mr. Latimer says. "They view that as a fee increase, which would cut down on their room-occupancy rates. And they were able to prevent us from charging the residential community."

If student demands continue to grow, Tennessee and other universities will have to start including charges for bandwidth in a separate technology fee, according to Mr. Latimer.

But if the university starts leveling additional fees, the two-thirds of the university's students who do not live in the dorms might contact their student representatives and pressure administrators to make residential students cover their own bandwidth costs, he says. The off-campus students "have been maintaining all along that the residential students should not get free access, and they have been pushing through their own student-governance process to have the residential dorms pay for network access."

The university's long-range plan includes using a bandwidth-management device, such as those manufactured by Packeteer or Allot Communications, that can control the flow and types of downloads going in and out of the university.

But there are institutions that plan to rely on their students' sense of restraint. Goshen College, a small institution in Indiana, has been hit by downloading fever, just like larger universities. "We know it's movie downloads using Morpheus and KaZaA," says Michael R. Sherer, the college's director of information technology. "Students have told us that movies are being downloaded, and they're in the 200- to 800-megabyte file-size range. That explains the sustained peaking that a lot of people are seeing -- the pipe is just filled up for hours at a time."

In Search of Files

However, much of that traffic was outbound -- users outside of the university were swamping Goshen's network in search of files on student computers. In the middle of the first week of the month, Mr. Sherer sent out a message to all of the students, showing them how to turn off the sharing option on the KaZaA and Morpheus programs. He also asked them to voluntarily curb their downloads. After the message went out, the traffic cleared up.

"We will buy a Packeteer if necessary, but like the U. of Delaware we would prefer education and cooperation," he says.

"We don't know much about scarcity in this culture, so this is a teachable moment. In time, we'll know if the lesson stuck."

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Section: Information Technology
Page: A44

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